Tom Stoppard

“Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.”

“It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.”

“I am not a mathematician, but I was aware that for centuries, mathematics was considered the queen of the sciences because it claimed certainty. It was grounded on some fundamental certainties - axioms - that led to others.”

“My scripts are possibly too talkative. Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, 'Oh, for God's sake, shut up.'”

“Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.”

“I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.”

“From as long as, literally as far back as I can remember I've liked puns, word jokes, I can literally recall looking at a comic at the age of six or seven and I remember what I enjoyed and what it was precisely and how the joke worked.”

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

“You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form.”

“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.”

“I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.”

“Any revival in which I am involved is liable to change.”

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

“I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn't wait to be out of education.”

“I write out of my intellectual experience.”

“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 think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn't sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future.”

“It's not the voting that's democracy it's the counting.”

“I like pop music. I consider rock 'n' roll to be a branch of pop music.”

“Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.”

“The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.”

“Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.”

“From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.”

“My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.”