Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
Artist Descending a Staircase (1972)
Quotations by:
Stoppard, Tom
GEORGE: There is presumably a calendar date — a moment — when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, secretly, the noes had it.
Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
Jumpers, Act 1 (1972)
DOTTY: It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.
Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
Jumpers, Act I (1972)
DOTTY: Archie says the Church is a monument to irrationality.
GEORGE: … 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! You stupid woman, if rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
Jumpers, Act I (1972)
Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering; the capacity for self-indulgence changes hands.
Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
Lord Malquist and Mr Moon, ch. 1 “Dramatis Personae and Other Coincidences” (1966)
Since we cannot hope for order let us withdraw with style from the chaos.
Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
Lord Malquist and Mr Moon, ch. 1 “Dramatis Personae and Other Coincidences” (1966)
My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
Lord Malquist and Mr Moon, ch. 2 “A Couple of Deaths and Exits” (1966)
My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
Lord Malquist and Mr Moon, ch. 2 “A Couple of Deaths and Exits” (1966)
MILNE: No matter how imperfect things are, if you’ve got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.
RUTH: I’m with you on the free press. It’s the newspapers I can’t stand.Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
Night and Day, Act 1 (1978)
MILNE: 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.
Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
Night and Day, Act 1 (1978)
ROSENCRANTZ: Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?
Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Act II (1967)
BAKUNIN: Left to themselves people are noble, generous, uncorrupted. They’d create a completely new kind of society if only people weren’t so blind, stupid and selfish.
HERZEN: Is that the same people or different people?
BAKUNIN: The same people.Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
The Coast of Utopia: Salvage (2002)
HENRY: 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 (b. 1937) Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
The Real Thing, Act 2, sc. 5 (1982)
(Source)
HENRY: Buddy Holly was twenty-two. Think of what he might have gone on to achieve. I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.
Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
The Real Thing, Act II, sc. 5 (1982)
JOYCE: An artist is the magician put among men to gratify — capriciously — their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. 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.
Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
Travesties. Act 1 (1974)
Stoppard called this "the most important" speech in the play.
GALE: Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.
Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
Where Are They Now? (1968)
(Source)
Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.
Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
Where Are They Now? [Gale] (1970)
(Source)
The line in the play -- originally broadcast on BBC Radio 3 -- was based on an answer Stoppard himself gave in an interview by Peter Evans, reprinted in David Bailey and Peter Evans, Goodbye Baby and Amen: A Saraband for the Sixties (1969):It is a very immature thing to worry about one’s stinking youth, but I don’t care: I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
I began my talk by saying that I had not written my plays for purposes of discussion. At once, I felt a ripple of panic run through the hall. I suddenly realized why. To everyone present, discussion was the whole point of drama. That was why the faculty had been endowed — that was why all those buildings had been put up! I had undermined the entire reason for their existence.
Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
In Kenneth Tynan, “Tom Stoppard,” New Yorker (19 Dec 1977)
I began my talk by saying that I had not written my plays for purposes of discussion. At once, I felt a ripple of panic run through the hall. I suddenly realised why. To everyone present, discussion was the whole point of drama. That was why the faculty had been endowed — that was why all those buildings had been put up! I had undermined the entire reason for their existence.
Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) Czech-English playwright and screenwriter
In Kenneth Tynan, “Tom Stoppard,” The New Yorker (19 Dec 1977)