No more you can, time must needs run backward, and since it will not, we must stir our way onward mixing as we go, disorder out of disorder into disorder until pink is complete, unchanging and unchangeable, and we are done with it for ever. This is known as free will or self-determination.

— Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard Quotes

There must have been a time, in the beginning, when we could have said – no. But somehow we missed it. Oh well, we’ll know better next time.

— Tom Stoppard

Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don’t like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical to ours.

— Tom Stoppard

Kissing girls is not like science, nor is it like sport. It is the third thing when you thought there were only two.

— Tom Stoppard

Romance

Gallons of ink and miles of typewriter ribbon expended on the misery of the unrequited lover; not a word about the utter tedium of the unrequiting.

— Tom Stoppard

A lesson in folly is worth two in wisdom.

— Tom Stoppard

Don’t clap too loudly – it’s a very old world.

— Tom Stoppard

The Plastic People of the Universe played ‘Venus in Furs’ from Velvet Underground, and I knew everything was basically okay.

— Tom Stoppard

They had it in for us, didn’t they? Right from the beginning. Who’d have thought that we were so important?

— Tom Stoppard

So it is with us all, we’re not so one-or-the-other. The one who puts on the clothes in the morning is the working majority, but at night-perhaps in the moment before unconsciousness- we meet our sleeper- the priest is visited by the doubter, the Marxist sees the civilizing force of the bourgeoisie, the captain of the industry admits the justice of common ownership.

— Tom Stoppard

I want a good story, with a beginning, middle and end.

— Tom Stoppard

No, no, no... you’ve got it all wrong... you can’t act death. The fact of it is nothing to do with seeing it happen – it’s not gasps and blood and falling about – that isn’t what makes it death. It’s just a man failing to reappear, that’s all – now you see him, now you don’t, that the only thing that’s real: here one minute and gone the next and never coming back – an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death.

— Tom Stoppard

How is a juggler you can’t hear or see or smell or touch different to no juggler at all?

— Tom Stoppard

He could not put down a word without suspecting that it might be the wrong one and that if he held back for another day the intermediate experience would provide the right one. There was no end to that, and Moon fearfully glimpsed himself as a pure writer who after a lifetime of absolutely no output whatsoever, would prepare on his deathbed the single sentence which was the distillation of everything he had saved up, and die before he was able to utter it.

— Tom Stoppard

Consistency is all I ask!

— Tom Stoppard

By why, Ligurinus, alas why this unaccustomed tear trickling down my cheek? – why does my glib tongue stumble to silence as I speak? At night I hold you fast in my dreams, I run after you across the Field of Mars, I follow you into the tumbling waters, and you show no pity.

— Tom Stoppard

As her tutor you have a duty to keep her in ignorance.

— Tom Stoppard

If everything from the furthest planet to the smallest atom of our brain acts according to Newton’s law of motion, what becomes of free will?

— Tom Stoppard

Mr Hodge, ignorance should be like an empty vessel waiting to be filled at the well of truth – not a cabinet of vulgar curios.

— Tom Stoppard

No more you can, time must needs run backward, and since it will not, we must stir our way onward mixing as we go, disorder out of disorder into disorder until pink is complete, unchanging and unchangeable, and we are done with it for ever. This is known as free will or self-determination.

— Tom Stoppard

Do not dabble in paradox, Edward, it puts you in danger of fortuitous wit.

— Tom Stoppard

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