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

Tom Stoppard Quotes

Information is light. Information in itself, about anything, is light.

— Tom Stoppard

To say that it is without pace, point, focus, interest, drama, wit or originality is to say simply that it does not happen to be my cup of tea.

— Tom Stoppard

If knowledge isn’t self-knowledge it isn’t doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing ‘When Father Painted the Parlour’? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. ‘She walks into beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.

— Tom Stoppard

There we were – demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance – and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. Don’t you see?! We’re actors – we’re the opposite of people!

— Tom Stoppard

When people discuss his plays, he says that he feels like he’s standing at customs watching an official ransack his luggage. He cheerfully declares responsibility for a play about two people, and suddenly the officer is finding all manner of exotic contraband like the nature of God and identity, and while he can’t deny that they’re there, he can’t for the life of him remember putting them there. In the end, a play is not the product of an idea; an idea is the product of a play.

— Tom Stoppard

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
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