Tom Stoppard

We are tied to a dead man's dream.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.

A man who has been dead for half an hour is not dead in the same sense as a man who has been dead for a hundred years.

We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look at it that way.

It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind.

It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.

The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.

I write plays because I'm interested in the human condition, and I'm interested in the human condition because I am human.

An artist is a person who has invented an artist.

If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning.

The only way to be a good writer is to be a good reader.

Words are innocent, they are the things that are guilty.

It's not the play that's the thing, it's the audience.

The history of the world is the history of the human race, and the history of the human race is the history of the human heart.

The universe is an information-processing machine.

The future is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

It's all the same. It's all the same. It's all the same. It's all the same.

We are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

The human brain is a wonderful thing. It starts working the moment you are born and never stops until you stand up to speak in public.