Play | Topics | Authors | Random

Danh ngôn của Tom Stoppard (Sứ mệnh: 4)

It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.
Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.
Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.
A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
Every exit is an entry somewhere else.
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.
I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.
I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design.
Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very modern anger against anti-Semitism.
I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.
My intention still is to write a play to commemorate, possibly rather skeptically, the 50th anniversary of the Russian revolution. I started it at the beginning of 1966, but confronted with the enormous importance and reality of that revolution, I absolutely boggle. I don't know what to do about it.
I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something that - even if it can't be quantitatively measured as other subjects - it's as fundamental to all education.
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.
Obviously, you would give your life for your children, or give them the last biscuit on the plate. But to me, the trick in life is to take that sense of generosity between kin, make it apply to the extended family and to your neighbour, your village and beyond.
I think I give the impression of being a romantic, and I think inside I'm quite severe. But some might say they had the opposite impression of me.
In January 1962, when I was the author of one and a half unperformed plays, I attended a student production of 'The Birthday Party' at the Victoria Rooms in Bristol. Just before it began, I realised that Harold Pinter was sitting in front of me.
Like almost everything else from the West, the Romantic Revolution arrived late in Russia.