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Quotes by Tom Stoppard

British dramatist & screenwriter (1937 - )

I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to the death your right to say it.

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

CP If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music... and of aviation.

CP Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

CP It is better to be quotable than to be honest.

Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything...death is not...It's the absence of presence, nothing more...the endless time of never coming back...a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound...

Rosencrantz: Do you think death could possibly be a boat? Guildenstern: No, no, no...Death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat. Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats. Guildenstern: No, no, no - what you've been is not on boats.

The days of the digital watch are numbered.

It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.

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's like being ambushed by a grotesque.

I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say.

If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice.

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.

We're actors - we're the opposite of people.

We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.

I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.

It's better to be quotable than to be honest.

We are tied down to a language that makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.