GUILT (quietly): Where we went wrong was getting on a boat. We can move, of course, change direction, rattle about, but our movement is contained within a larger one that carries us along as inexorably as the wind and current…

— Tom Stoppard

He could not put down a word without suspecting that it might be the wrong one and that if he held back for another day the intermediate experience would provide the right one. There was no end to that, and Moon fearfully glimpsed himself as a pure writer who after a lifetime of absolutely no output whatsoever, would prepare on his deathbed the single sentence which was the distillation of everything he had saved up, and die before he was able to utter it.

— Tom Stoppard

He's never known anything like it! But then, he has never known anything to write home about, so this is nothing to write home about.

— Tom Stoppard

Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.

— Tom Stoppard

I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.

— Tom Stoppard

I believe in mess, tears, pain, self-abasement, loss of self-respect, nakedness. Not caring doesn’t seem much different from not loving.

— Tom Stoppard

I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design.

— Tom Stoppard

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.

— Tom Stoppard

I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.

— Tom Stoppard

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation.

— Tom Stoppard