649 Quotes by Tom Stoppard

...Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that what is taken to be true. It's the currency if living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions. What do you assume?

My intention still is to write a play to commemorate, possibly rather skeptically, the 50th anniversary of the Russian revolution. I started it at the beginning of 1966, but confronted with the enormous importance and reality of that revolution, I absolutely boggle. I don't know what to do about it.

When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all.

The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.

Player: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life question your sitution at every turn.

The notion that the 'leader' has the right to ask huge sacrifices of your generation for a notional future paradise - if you'd be good enough to lie down under the wheels of the juggernaut - that sentimental and self-aggrandising rationalisation for brute force and cowardice I felt from adolescence was wrong.

Why should I write a play? I don't have to write a play, do I? But somehow, I think that's what I'm here for, so I'd better do it.

The fact is that people are attracted to new work and by new work.

To be in love with Debo Devonshire is hardly a distinction.