649 Quotes by Tom Stoppard

If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.

Maybe Napoleon was wrong when he said we were a nation of shopkeepers... Today England looked like a nation of goalkeepers.

I like dialogue that is slightly more brittle than life. I have always admired and wished to write one of those 1940s film scripts where every line is written with a sharpness and economy that is frankly artificial.

To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.

It's wholly deserved and I am completely thrilled. As a writer he has been unswerving for 50 years, ... a most fitting award.

ROS: Why don't you go and have a look? GUIL: Pragmatism?! - is that all you have to offer?

No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.

Success is a sort of metaphysical experience. I live exactly as I did before - only on a slightly bigger scale. Naturally, I won't be corrupted. I'll sit there in my Rolls, uncorrupted, and tell my chauffeur, uncorruptedly, where to go.

I'm not like some other writers: I have no actual urgent need or desire to add to what's written. You write it; if you're lucky, it's performed, and that's the end of the whole thing.