Quotes by Tom Stoppard

• The days of the digital watch are numbered.
• James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.
• Life in a box is better than no life at all... I expect.
• Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.
• Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.
• My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
• My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.
• Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.
• Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.
• The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.
• 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 media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.
• We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain.
• We're actors. We're the opposite of people.
• It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.
• A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
• Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
• Every exit is an entry somewhere else.
• It's better to be quotable than to be honest.
• Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
• Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.
• Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?
• From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.
• Get me inside any boardroom and I'll get any decision I want.
• It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing.
• It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.
• Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.
• It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
• Good things, when short, are twice as good.
• If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.
• If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.
• I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
• I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.