Tom Stoppard

The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It's essentially self-interested on the part of authority.

As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas. I have no illusions about that.

If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.

I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.

I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.

I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.

Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.

The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.

My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.

Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight. Equilibrium is pragmatic. You have to get everything into proportion. You compensate, rebalance yourself so that you maintain your angle to your world. When the world shifts, you shift.

War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don't want to be a hero.

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

There's something scary about stupidity made coherent.

I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.

If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.

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 not sound.

I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.

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.

We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man?