649 Quotes by Tom Stoppard

Left to themselves people are noble, generous, uncorrupted, they'd create a completely new kind of society if only people weren't so blind, stupid and selfish.

The more doors there are for you to open, the better the play.

Public postures have the configuration of private derangement.

Despite the digital age, there is a very large number of venues and spaces that are looking for plays, and many of them are looking for new plays.

The idea of the state is, or should be, a very limited, prescribed idea. The state looks after the defense of the realm, and other matters - raising revenue to pay for things which are for all of us, and so on. That idea has turned turtle now. The state isn't any longer perceived as an institution which exists to serve us.

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

'Arcadia' is obviously a play that's got interesting things in it that are perhaps quite hard to grasp.

Even when the writing seems very frivolous, I'm puritanical. I don't mean my subject matter. It's that I'm almost pathologically incapable of leaving something when I'm not quite happy with it.

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.