Tom Stoppard Quotes

Czech–English playwright (1937–2025)

Sir Tom Stoppard OM CBE FRSL (born Tomáš Straussler; 3 July 1937) is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter, knighted in 1997.

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Alternative Names: Sir Tom Stoppard • Sir Tom Stoppard OM CBE • Tomáš Sträussler

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Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.

the natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. strangely enough it all works out in the end... it's a mystery.

It would have been nice to have had unicorns.

What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?

Death is the ultimate negative.

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

The days of the digitals are numbered. The metaphor is built into them like a self-destruct mechanism.

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

The Church's idea of the good and the beautiful excludes sexual aberration, apart from chastity, I suppose because it's the rarest

We keep to our usual stuff, more or less, only inside out. We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else.

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering; the capacity for self-indulgence changes hands.

THOMASINA:
But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue!

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

Why do I have a sense of impending disaster?
(He reflects) Sonders is after my niece and has discovered the secret address where I am sending her to the safe keeping of my sister-in-law Miss Blumenblatt, who has never laid eyes on him, or, for that matter, on Marie either since she was a baby — while I have to leave my business in the charge of my assistant and an apprentice, and follow my new servant, whom I haven't had time to introduce to anyone, to town to join the parade and take my fiancée to dinner in a uniform I can't sit down in.
One false move and we could have a farce on our hands.

I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.