Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Tom Stoppard, fully Sir Tom Stoppard, born Tomáš Straüssler

Czech-born English Playwright, Novelist and Writer for TV, Radio, Film and Stage

"It's wholly deserved and I am completely thrilled. As a writer he has been unswerving for 50 years, ... a most fitting award."

"It's where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it's for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn't matter where on what, it's the light itself, against the darkness, it's what's left of God's purpose when you take away God."

"It's the wanting to know that makes us matter."

"James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized."

"I've seldom minded other people's opinions, but the other side of that coin is that I've seldom been interested by them, um their opinions about me I mean."

"I've got no interest in educating or instructing people."

"Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins."

"Language is a finite instrument crudely applied to an infinity of ideas, and one consequence of the failure to take account of this is that modern philosophy has made itself ridiculous by analysing such statements as, This is a good bacon sandwich, or, Bedser had a good wicket."

"LADY CROOM: You have been reading too many novels by Mrs Radcliffe, that is my opinion. This is a garden for The Castle of Otranto or The Mysteries of Udolpho -- CHATER: The Castle of Otranto, my lady, is by Horace Walpole. NOAKES: (Thrilled) Mr Walpole the gardener?! LADY CROOM: Mr Chater, you are a welcome guest at Sidley Park but while you are one, The Castle of Otranto was written by whomsoever I say it was, otherwise what is the point of being a guest or having one?"

"Left to themselves people are noble, generous, uncorrupted, they'd create a completely new kind of society if only people weren't so blind, stupid and selfish."

"Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else."

"Life is a gamble at terrible odds, if it were a bet, you would not take it."

"Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead."

"Michael: March here, march there, present arms, where's your cap? — you've no idea, the whole Army's obsessed with playing at soldiers."

"Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up."

"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."

"Miss Frobisher smiles, with little cause that I know of. If Jesus of Nazareth had had before him the example of Miss Frobisher getting through the Latin degree papers of the London University Examinations Board he wouldn’t have had to fall back on camels and the eyes of needles, and Miss Frobisher’s name would be a delightful surprise to encounter in Matthew, Chapter 19; as would, even more surprisingly, the London University Examinations Board. Your name is not Miss Frobisher? What is your name? Miss Burton. I’m very sorry. I stand corrected. If Jesus of Nazareth had had before him the example of Miss Burton getting through the... Oh, dear, I hope it is not I who have made you cry."

"My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation for the next play or, ideally, into it."

"Milne: No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable. Ruth: I'm with you on the free press. It's the newspapers I can't stand."

"My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers."

"No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable."

"My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful."

"Never believe in mirrors or newspapers."

"Now for a handful of guilders I happen to have a private and uncut performance of the rape of the Sabine Women - or rather woman, or rather Alfred -Get your skirt on Alfred!"

"Now Bach ... a splash in the making."

"Not only has Harold Pinter written some of the outstanding plays of his time, he has also blown fresh air into the musty attic of conventional English literature, by insisting that everything he does has a public and political dimension."

"People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse in the places where everybody is kept in the dark."

"Oh, you're going to zap me with penicillin and pesticides. Spare me that and I'll spare you the bomb and aerosols. But don't confuse progress with perfectibility. A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There's no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle's cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God's crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can't think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars - big bangs, black holes - who gives a shit? How did you people con us out of all that status? All that money?"

"Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does."

"On the one hand, it makes life very difficult for them. On the other hand - and this isn't a recommendation for being a suppressed writer - in their situation now, as with Havel and his friends in the '70s and '80s, the consolation is that your work matters."

"Personally I am in favor of education but a university is not the place for it."

"Player: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life question your situation at every turn."

"Pirates could happen to anyone."

"Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don't like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical to ours."

"Public postures have the configuration of private derangement."

"Reality, the name we give to the common experience."

"Real data is messy. ...It's all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it's playing your song, but unfortunately it's out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk- I mean, the noise! Impossible!"

"Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them."

"Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway. Guildenstern: What? Rosencrantz: England. Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?"

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

"Rosencrantz: Shouldn't we be doing something--constructive? Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? ... A short, blunt human pyramid...?"

"Septimus. When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be all alone, on an empty shore. Thomasina. Then we will dance. Is this a waltz?"

"SEPTIMUS: My lady, I was alone with my thoughts in the gazebo, when Mrs. Chater ran me to ground, and I being in such a passion, in an agony of unrelieved desire -- LADY CROOM: Oh....! SEPTIMUS: -- I thought in my madness that the Chater with her skirts over her head would give me the momentary illusion of the happiness to which I dared not put a face. (Pause.) LADY CROOM: I do not know when I have received a more unusual compliment, Mr Hodge. I hope I am more than a match for Mrs Chater with her head in a bucket. Does she wear drawers? SEPTIMUS: She does. LADY CROOM: Yes, I have heard that drawers are being worn now. It is unnatural for women to be got up like jockeys. I cannot approve."

"Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That reminds me—I spotted something between her legs that made me think of you."

"Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat? Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat. Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats. Guildenstern: No, no, no--what you've been is not on boats."

"Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art."

"Since we cannot hope for order let us withdraw with style from the chaos."

"Success in life is to maintain this ecstasy, to burn always with this hard gemlike flame."

"Stark raving sane."

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