Quote

Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead.

Tom Stoppard

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Tom Stoppard
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: July 3
Dramaturge
Film Director
Journalist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Zlin
Sir Tom Stoppard
Life
Dead
Least
Chance
Lying
Better
Wells
Well
Boxes
Thinking
Expect

More quotes by Tom Stoppard

Image
Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last.
Tom Stoppard
Image
Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.
Tom Stoppard
Image
You always end up with too much, so it's good to be part of the conversation about not just what you can omit, but how you are going to do the grammar of the omission, how you make things continue to work when there's something missing. It's your last chance to rewrite.
Tom Stoppard
Image
I burn with no causes.
Tom Stoppard
Image
In January 1962, when I was the author of one and a half unperformed plays, I attended a student production of 'The Birthday Party' at the Victoria Rooms in Bristol. Just before it began, I realised that Harold Pinter was sitting in front of me.
Tom Stoppard
Image
If you were handed power on a plate you'd be left fighting over a plate.
Tom Stoppard
Image
Chater: You dare to call me that. I demand satisfaction! Septimus: Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you are demanding satisfaction. I cannot spend my time day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family.
Tom Stoppard
Image
Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.
Tom Stoppard
Image
When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?
Tom Stoppard
Image
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.
Tom Stoppard
Image
Save the gerund and screw the whale.
Tom Stoppard
Image
I like plays where people talk a lot. Conversation is sustained. Argument is sustained.
Tom Stoppard
Image
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
Image
No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.
Tom Stoppard
Image
My mind gets into a verbal mode.
Tom Stoppard
Image
Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.
Tom Stoppard
Image
It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.
Tom Stoppard
Image
Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.
Tom Stoppard
Image
You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?
Tom Stoppard
Image
It's where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it's for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn't matter where on what, it's the light itself, against the darkness, it's what's left of God's purpose when you take away God.
Tom Stoppard