Tom Stoppard Quotes

Wagner: There were printers getting more than journalists!
Milne: Yes, I know, but you make it sound as if the natural order has been overthrown. Fish sing in the streets, rivers run uphill, and the printers are getting more than the journalists. Okay — you're worth more than a printer. But look at some of this — "We find the vanishing vicar of Lovers' Leap!" "Sally Smith is a tea lady in a Blackpool engineering works, but it was the way she filled those C-cups which got our cameraman all stirred up!" It's crap. And it's written by grown men earning maybe ten thousand a year. If I was a printer, I'd look at some of the stuff I'm given to print, and I'd ask myself what is supposed to be so special about the people who write it — is that radical enough for you — Dick?

Public postures have the configuration of private derangement.

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

I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.

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

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

Can't you function unless you're losing?

WILDE: Oh — Bosie! (He weeps.) I have to go back to him, you know. Robbie will be furious but it can't be helped. The betrayal of one's friends is a bagatelle in the stakes of love, but the betrayal of oneself is a lifelong regret. Bosie is what became of me. He is spoiled, vindictive, utterly selfish and not very talented, but these are merely the facts. The truth is he was Hyacinth when Apollo loved him, he is ivory and gold, from his red rose-leaf lips comes music that fills me with joy, he is the only one who understands me. 'Even as a teething child throbs with ferment, so does the soul of him who gazes upon the boy's beauty; he can neither sleep at night nor keep still by day,' and a lot more besides, but before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself. Then we saw what we had made — the piece of ice in the fist you cannot hold or let go. (He weeps.)

Well, we'll know better next time.

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

HENRY: You don’t get visited by happiness like being lucky with the weather. The weather is the weather.
DEBBIE: And happiness?
HENRY: Happiness is . . . equilibrium. Shift your weight.

Herzen: Marx is a bourgeois from the anus up. Natalie : Alexander! I won't have that word... Herzen: Sorry, middle-class.

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.

I will take his secret to the grave, telling people along the way. Betrayal is no sin if it is whimsical.

You think human nature is a beast, that it must be put in a cage. But it's the cage that makes the animal bad.