649 Quotes by Tom Stoppard

Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one’s arms around a side of beef.

I don’t think I can be expected to take seriously any game which takes less than three days to reach its conclusion.

Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don’t like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical to ours.

The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe – responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.

The names for things don’t come first. Words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.

I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven’t got a play cooking.

I’m a conservative kind of person. I don’t think rightwing is quite the same thing. But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament.

I don’t act, I don’t direct, I don’t design.

It’s the wanting to know that makes us matter.