Tom Stoppard Life Quotations

If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.

It is no light matter to put in jeopardy a single life when it is the very singularity of each life which underpins the idea of a just society.

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.

For me, human rights simply endorse a view of life and a set of moral values that are perfectly clear to an eight-year-old child. A child knows what is fair and isn't fair, and justice derives from that knowledge.

It is easily and often overlooked that when Thomas Jefferson asserted that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were inalienable human rights, he did so on the ground that they had been endowed by God, our Creator.

My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.

Time is short, life is short, there's a lot to know. So I skip the entertainers in the newspaper now. I just haven't got time.

Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.

I like dialogue that is slightly more brittle than life. I have always admired and wished to write one of those 1940s film scripts where every line is written with a sharpness and economy that is frankly artificial.

The whole excitement for writing anything is quite intense. And for a day or two, you think you've done everything extremely well. The problems start on the third day, and continues for the rest of your life.

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

My life is sectioned off into hot flushes, pursuits of this or that.

On the one hand, it makes life very difficult for them. On the other hand - and this isn't a recommendation for being a suppressed writer - in their situation now, as with Havel and his friends in the '70s and '80s, the consolation is that your work matters.

I don't draw on my inner life in my work.

I'm very unhappy about my entire life if my writing is going wrong.

The trouble is, I can't find a part of myself where you're not important. I write in order to be worth your while and to finance the way I want to live with you. Not the way you want to live. The way I want to live with you. Without you I wouldn't care. I'd eat tinned spaghetti and put on yesterday's clothes. But as it is I change my socks, and make money, and tart up Brodie's unspeakable drivel into speakable drivel so he can be an author too, like me.

For 10 years of my life, 3 times a day, I thanked the Lord for what I was about to receive and thanked him again for what I had just received, and then we lost touch and I suddenly thought, where is he now

Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead.