Tom Stoppard Quotes

When I was twelve I was obsessed. Everything was sex. Latin was sex. The dictionary fell open at 'meretrix', a harlot. You could feel the mystery coming off the word like musk. 'Meretrix'! This was none of your mensa-a-table, this was a flash from a forbidden planet, and it was everywhere. History was sex, French was sex, art was sex, the Bible, poetry, penfriends, games, music, everything was sex except biology which was obviously sex but not really sex, not the one which was secret and ecstatic and wicked and a sacrament and all the things it was supposed to be but couldn't be at one and the same time - I got that in the boiler room and it turned out to be biology after all.

The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices — after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's.

Mageeba: Do you know what I mean by a relatively free press, Mr. Wagner? Wagner: Not exactly, sir, no. Mageeba: I mean a free press which is edited by one of my relatives.

We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.

I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.

I should have the courage of my lack of convictions.

The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.

We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man?