649 Quotes by Tom Stoppard

You’re familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?

War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don’t want to be a hero.

He’s never known anything like it! But then, he has never known anything to write home about, so this is nothing to write home about.

We’re better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it’ll rain on auntie’s garden party three Sundays from now.

I don’t really have a system or set of principles. It’s kind of common sense mixed up with instinct.

If knowledge isn’t self-knowledge it isn’t doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing ‘When Father Painted the Parlour’? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. ‘She walks into beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.

I’ve got no interest in educating or instructing people.

I don’t write at the library, because I smoke when I work or would like the possibility of a smoke. Also, I need to be at my own desk.

I’ve seldom minded other people’s opinions, but the other side of that coin is that I’ve seldom been interested by them, um their opinions about me I mean.