We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the...
Tom Stoppard’s other work includes: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, After Magritte, The Real Thing, Enter A Free Man, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink (a stage a...
They loved, and quarreled, and made up, and loved, and fought, and were true to each other and untrue. She made him the happiest man in the whole world and the most wretched, and after a few years she...
The ‘role of the theatre’ is much debated (by almost nobody, of course), but the thing defines itself in practice first and foremost as a recreation. This seems satisfactory. TOM STOPPARD 1993
The trouble is, I can't find a part of myself where you're not important. I write in order to be worth your while and to finance the way I want to live with you. Not the way you want to live. The way...
The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.
The Almost Free Theatre, the Fun Art Bus and the rest of them were phenomena of a decade which was simultaneously playful and desperately serious; and
It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.
I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.
I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn't one's lover.
HENRY:Leave me out of it. They don’t count. Maybe Brodie got a raw deal, maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. It doesn’t count. He’s a lout with language. I can’t help somebody who thinks, or thinks he thin...
Guil: …The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices— after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people’s. Player: Unc...
Even a single coin has music in it, should it be gold.- the player
Do not despair—many are happy much of the time; more eat than starve, more are healthy than sick, more curable than dying; not so many dying as dead; and one of the thieves was saved. Hell's bells and...
All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.
And for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute...
Real data is messy. ...It's all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it's playing your song, but unfortunately it's out of whack, some of the strings are mi...
My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.
You stupid woman, if rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!
What a fine persecution—to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.