Tom Stoppard Quotes

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.

We’re better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it’ll rain on auntie’s garden party three Sundays from now.

I don’t think I can be expected to take seriously a game which takes less than three days to reach its conclusion.

Ambushing the audience is what theatre is all about.

Maybe Napoleon was wrong when he said we were a nation of shopkeepers… Today England looked like a nation of goalkeepers.

I learned three things in Zurich during the war… Firstly you’re either a revolutionary or you’re not, and if you’re not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can’t be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary… I forget the third thing.

War is capitalism with the gloves off.

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

Sometimes I dream of revolution, a bloody coup d’etat by the second rank – troupes of actors slaughtered by their understudies, magicians sawn in half by indefatigably smiling glamour girls, cricket teams wiped out by marauding bands of twelfth men.

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.