Quotes

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

Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

Actors are the opposite of people.

If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice.

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

It seems pointless to be quoted if one isn't going to be quotable. It's better to be quotable than honest.

The days of the digitals are numbered. The metaphor is built into them like a self-destruct mechanism.

The truth is always a compound of two half-truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say.

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

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

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.

Every exit is an entry somewhere.

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?

Never believe in mirrors or newspapers.

I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to the death your right to say it. [parodying the saying of Voltaire: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to death your right to say it."]

[In 1968] I was asked to sign a protest against "censorship" after a newspaper declined to publish somebody's manifesto. "But that isn't censorship," I said. "That's editing. In Russia you go to prison for possessing a copy of Animal Farm. That's censorship."

[In 1968] A few miles away across the Channel, clashes between protesters and riot police were affairs of burning cars, overturned buses and buildings turned to rubble. Our own street-fighting man was only rock 'n' roll.

[In 1968] It wasn't all posh, of course. The "scene", as we called it, was more populously located in a shifting underground of art events - exhibitions, gigs, happenings, poetry readings - in dark places around Covent Garden and elsewhere and here the word "revolution" takes on some substance, I think. It was not a social revolution, but there was a sense of a cultural revolution pivoted on that moment. Unfortunately, I was embarrassed by that, too. I loved the music and the dressing up but I couldn't take to the dialogue: a reductive argot of comrade-jargon and bogus wisdom derived from misunderstood eastern religions.

If I had known in 1968 what we were going to squander, long before we had the excuse of 9/11, I might have joined in the fun with less embarrassment, with less to lose. But at the time all the goings-on seemed frivolous compared with the freedoms we had invented - or should I say the freedoms you invented?

'I was 31, I had been earning a living for 14 years, I was too old, too self-conscious, too monogamous, too frightened of drugs, too much in love with England and too hung up to let it all hang out.

Early on in my career, I had an interview with Mr Charles Wintour, the editor of the Evening Standard. At one point, Mr Wintour asked me if I were interested in politics. Thinking all journalists should be interested in politics, I told him I was. He then asked me who the current home secretary was. Of course, I had no idea who the current home secretary was, and, in any event, it was an unfair question. I'd only admitted to an interest in politics. I hadn't claimed I was obsessed with the subject.

I find, looking back on my plays in general, that things tended to work out better if I didn't quite know where I was going with them.

I think, like a lot of writers, I've got a cheap side and an expensive side. I mean rather like a musician might stop composing for a few days to do a jingle for 'Katomeat' because he thinks it's fun.

The first time I met Harold Pinter was when I was a student journalist in Bristol and he came down to see a student production of The Birthday Party. I realised he was sitting in front of me. I was tremendously intimidated and spent a good long time working out how to engage him in conversation. Finally, I tapped him on the shoulder and said, 'Are you Harold Pinter or do you just look like him?' He said, 'What?' So that was the end of that.

In the period just before the arrival of Margaret Thatcher, politics had been in such low esteem. Everything was so hedged, so mealy-mouthed. Then along came this woman who seemed to have no manners at all and who said exactly what she thought. She turned the political scene into a kind of Bateman cartoon, and everyone's eyes were popping and their jaws were dropping. I really enjoyed that, although I don't consider that period a good influence on my own world.

I find it deeply embarrassing when, because art takes notice of something important, it's claimed that the art is important. It's not. We are talking about marginalia - the top tiny fraction of the whole edifice. When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all.

I'm an English middle-class bourgeois, who prefers to read a book to almost anything else. It would be an insane pretension for me to write 'poems of a petrol bomber'.

I came here [to Britain] when I was eight. Within minutes, it seems to me, I had no sense of being in an alien land and my feelings for English landscape, English architecture, English character, all this, have just somehow become stronger and stronger.

The term artist isn't intelligible to me if it doesn't entail making.

I wrote a play about Charles I when I was twelve. It was surprisingly conventional; he died in the end.

It's about to make me rich - (Stoppard's response to the question - what is "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" about?) - after its first night in New York (December 2, 1995)

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.

It is a defect of God's humour that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.

When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be all alone, on an empty shore.Then we will dance.

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

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. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.

I have always found that irony among the lower orders is the first sign of an awakening social consciousness.

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

There must have been a time, in the beginning, when we could have said - no. But somehow we missed it.

For every thousand people there's nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who's the artist.

What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships - and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes - husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer.

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.

A foreign correspondent is someone who lives in foreign parts and corresponds, usually in the form of essays containing no new facts. Otherwise he's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.

To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.

The National Gallery is a monument to irrationality! Every concert hall is a monument to irrationality! And so is a nicely kept garden, or a lover's favour, or a home for stray dogs! If rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!

I will take his secret to the grave, telling people along the way. Betrayal is no sin if it is whimsical.

An artist is the magician put among men to gratify - capriciously - their urge for immortality.

Wake me up for breakfast, if I'm not dead.