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@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) *
@Q: My problem is that I am not frightfully interested in anything, except
myself. And of all forms of fiction autobiography is the most gratuitous.
@R: _Lord Malquist and Mr Moon_ pt. 2
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) *
@Q: We're _actors_--we're the opposite of people!...Think, in you head,
_now_, think of the most..._private_..._secret_..._intimate_ thing you have
ever done secure in the knowledge of its privacy... Are you thinking of
it?... Well, I saw you do it!_
@R: _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_ (1967) act 2
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) *
@Q: Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only tht which is taken
to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it,
but it doesn't make any difference so long as it's honored.
@R: _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_ (1967) act 2
@K: truth
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) *
@Q: 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 is
like being ambushed by a grotesque.
@R: _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_ (1967) act 1
@K: truth
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) *
@Q: A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense
not to himself.
@R: _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_ (1967) act 2
@K: sense and nonsense
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) *
@Q: For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and
time is its only measure.
@R: _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_ (1967) act 2
@K: mortality
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) *
@Q: We've travelled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly
towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.
@R: _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_ (1967) act 3
@K: impotence
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) *
@Q: Milne: No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press
everything is correctable, and without it everything is conceivable.
Ruth: I'm with you on the free press. It's the newspapers I can't
stand.
@R: _Night and Day_ (1978) act 1
@%: Cf. Schulz, Charles Monroe
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) *
@Q: A foreign correspondent is someone who lives in foreign parts and
corresponds, usually in the form of essays containing no new facts.
Otherwise he's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that
the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived
to cover it.
@R: _Night and Day_ (1978) act 1
@K: journalists
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) *
@Q: War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it
but they go to war because they don't want to be a hero.
@R: _Travesties_ (1975) act 1
@K: war
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) *
@Q: I doubt that art needed Ruskin any more than a moving train needs one
of its passengers to shove it.
@R: _Times Literary Supplement_ 3 June 1977
@K: people:Ruskin, John
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) *
@Q: Socialists treat their servants with respect rather and then wonder why
they vote Conservative.
@R: _Lord Malquist and Mr Moon_ pt. 5, ch. 1
@K: politics
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) *
@Q: This is a British murder inquiry and some degree of justice must be
seen to be more or less done.
@R: _Jumpers_ (1972) act 2
@K: justice
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) *
@Q: 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.
@R: _Lord Malquist and Mr Moon_ pt. 6, ch. 1
@K: Houses of Parliament
@%: Cf. Kipling, Rudyard
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) *
@Q: What is an artist? For every thousand people there's nine hundred
doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard
who's the artist.
@R: _Travesties_ (1975) act 1
@K: artists
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) *
@Q: Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful
objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives
us modern art.
@R: _Artist Descending a Staircase_
@K: art
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) +
@Q: I've always treated money as the stuff with which one purchases time.
@K: money
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) +
@Q: A truth is always a compound of two half-truths, and you can never
reach it, because there is always something more to say.
@R: in _The Guardian_ 1973
@K: truth
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) *
@Q: It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.
@R: _Jumpers_ (1972) act 1
@K: democracy
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) *
@Q: Wagner: You don't care much for the media, do you, Ruth?
Ruth: The media. It souns like a convention of spiritualists.
Carson: Ruth has mixed feelings about reporters.
@R: _Night and Day_ (1978) act 1
@K: media
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) +
@Q: All new plays are old plays.
@K: theatre
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) +
@Q: I write fiction because it's a way of making statements that I can
disown. I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of
contradicting myself.
@R: in _The Guardian_ 1973
@K: writers
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) +
@Q: I think art ought to involve itself in contemporary social and
politicalhistory as much as anything else but I find it deeply embarrassing
when large claims are made for such an involvement. When because art takes
notice of something important it's then claimed that art is important.
It's not. We're talking about marginalia. The tiny fraction of the whole
edifice. When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas
chamber, he'd said it all. I never felt this, that art is important.
That's been my secret guilt and I think it is the secret guilt of most
artists.
@R: in _The Guardian_ 1973
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) +
@Q: There is a secret in Art isn't there? And the secret consist of what
the artist has secretly and privatly done. You will tumble some, and not
others. The whole process of putting them in, albeit unconsciously gives
Art thatyyytexture which sensibility tells one is valuable.
@R: in _Sunday Times_ 1974
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) +
@Q: The trouble with success is that it immediately diminshes your mental
conception of what it should be.
@R: in _The Times_ 1972
@K: success
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) *
@Q: 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.
@R: _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_ (1967) act 1
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) *
@Q: The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.
@R: _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_ (1967) act 2
@%: Cf. Wilde, Oscar
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) *
@Q: To sum up: your father, whom you love, dies, you are his heir, you come
back to find that hardly was the corpse cold before his younger brother
popped on to his throne and into his sheets, thereby offending both legal
and natural practice. Now why exactly are you behaving in this
extraordinary manner.
@R: _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_ (1967) act 1
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) *
@Q: I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you
blood and rhetoric without the love and I can do you all three concurrent
or consecutive but I can't do you love and rhetoric without blood. Blood
is compulsory--they're all blood you see.
@R: _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_ (1967) act 1
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) *
@Q: Guildenstern: Well then--one of the Greeks, perhaps? You're familiar
with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?
Matri, patri, sorori, uxori and it goes without saying--suicidal--hm?
Maidens aspiring to godheads--
Rosencrantz: And vice versa.
@R: _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_ (1967) act 1
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) +
@Q: It's about to make me a rich man.
@%: When asked by a friend what _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Death_
was about.
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) *
@Q: 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.
@R: _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_ (1967) act 3
@K: death
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) *
@Q: Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?
@R: _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_ (1967) act 2
@K: eternity
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) +
@Q: I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
@R: in D. Bailey _Goodbye Baby And Amen_ (1969)
@K: age
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-)
@Q: 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.
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) *
@Q: Life is a gamble at terrible odds--if it was a bet, you wouldn't take
it.
@R: _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_ (1967) act 3
@K: life
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) +
@Q: It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
@R: _The Guardian_
@K: honesty; quotations
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-)
@Q: James Joyce--an essentially private man who wished his total
indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.
@K: people:Joyce, James
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-)
@Q: Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has at least one
thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where
responsible journalism begins.
@K: journalism
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-)
@Q: My dear Tristan, to be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland
during a World War.
@K: artists
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-)
@Q: No, no, no... you've got it all wrong... you can't act death. The
_fact_ of it is nothing to do with seeing it happen--it's not gasps and
blood and falling about--that isn't what makes it death. It's just a man
failing to reappear, that's all--now you see him, now you don't, that's the
only thing that's real: here one minute and gone the next and never coming
back--an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering
weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death.
@K: death
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-) +
@Q: Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.
@K: revolution
@A: Stoppard, Tom (1937-)
@Q: Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the
chaos.
@K: order