Tom Stoppard

Age is a high price to pay for maturity.

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

Lies are the mortar that bind the bricks of deception. Without lies you have no mortar. Without mortar, you have no wall of deception to defend your reputation... and get along in the world.

I am not at all the kind of person who believes in not spoiling the word.

It's better to be quotable than to be honest.

Certainty is the enemy of truth.

A man ignoring a woman's apology is her greatest insult.

When we have found how the body of this universe is bound together, we shall know the central force and motives of our lives.

In the heat of the moment, the mind is an excellent servant, but a terrible master.

The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about, clouds and small birds on the wing and the way the wind feels on your face when you are travelling at speed in an open carriage, is all tainted with the knowledge that it will all end one day.

You cannot have your cake and eat it, which is a proverb contravened daily by the restaurateur. No one is born for a single purpose; no one could imagine himself as anything other than what he is.

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

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.

A flaw is a crack in the structure, but it doesn't mean the whole thing is about to collapse.

The pursuit of perfection always implies a definite aristocracy of the intelligentsia, which guards the sacred fire and passes on the torch.

I write because it's fun. What the hell, if I do not write, they will not read me.

Happiness is a personal collision with the divine.

You can't make love to absolutes.

The House of Lords is the British peerage governing the British peerage.

I'm a writer. If I can't write about what I know, what can I write about?