Tom Stoppard

I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.

We are tied down to a language that makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occured to you that you don't go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one's memory. And yet, I can't remember it.

The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music... and of aviation.

I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to the death your right to say it.

It's better to be quotable than to be honest.

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything...death is not...It's the absence of presence, nothing more...the endless time of never coming back...a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound...

Rosencrantz: Do you think death could possibly be a boat?
Guildenstern: No, no, no...Death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat.
Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats.
Guildenstern: No, no, no - what you've been is not on boats.

The days of the digital watch are numbered.

It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood when it first occurred to you that you don't go on for ever. It must have been shattering- stamped into one's memory. And yet I can't remember it. It never occurred to me at all. What does one make of that? We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the words for it, before we know that there are words, out we come, bloodied and squalling with the knowledge that for all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.

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's like being ambushed by a grotesque.

I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say.

If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice.

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.

We're actors - we're the opposite of people.

We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.

It is better to be quotable than to be honest.

Every exit is an entry somewhere.

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

We're actors--we're the opposite of people.

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.

Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?