What freedom means, is being allowed to sing in my bath as loudly as will not interfere with my neighbor's freedom to sing a different tune in his.

— Tom Stoppard

What is the society we wish to protect? Is it the society of complete surveillance for the commonwealth? Is this the wealth we seek to have in common - optimal security at the cost of maximal surveillance?

— Tom Stoppard

Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we'd know that we were lost. A China man of the T'ang Dynasty - and, by which definition, a philosopher - dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; his two-fold security.

— Tom Stoppard

When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all.

— Tom Stoppard

When I was 20, the idea of having a play on anywhere was just beyond my dreams.

— Tom Stoppard

When I was twelve I was obsessed. Everything was sex. Latin was sex. The dictionary fell open at 'matrix', a harlot. You could feel the mystery coming off the word like musk. 'Matrix'! This was none of your Mensa-a-table, this was a flash from a forbidden planet, and it was everywhere. History was sex, French was sex, art was sex, the Bible, poetry, penfriends, games, music, everything was sex except biology which was obviously sex but not really sex, not the one which was secret and ecstatic and wicked and a sacrament and all the things it was supposed to be but couldn't be at one and the same time - I got that in the boiler room, and it turned out to be biology after all.

— Tom Stoppard

When you stir your rice pudding, Sections, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?

— Tom Stoppard

When you write, it's making a certain kind of music in your head. There's a rhythm to it, a pulse, and on the whole, I'm writing to that drum rather than the psychological process.

— Tom Stoppard

WILDE: Oh — Bowie! (He weeps.) I have to go back to him, you know. Robbie will be furious, but it can't be helped. The betrayal of one's friends is a bagatelle in the stakes of love, but the betrayal of oneself is a lifelong regret. Bowie is what became of me. He is spoiled, vindictive, utterly selfish and not very talented, but these are merely the facts. The truth is he was Hyacinth when Apollo loved him, he is ivory and gold, from his red rose-leaf lips comes music that fills me with joy, he is the only one who understands me. 'Even as a teething child throbs with ferment, so does the soul of him who gazes upon the boy's beauty; he can neither sleep at night nor keep still by day,' and a lot more besides, but before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bowie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself. Then we saw what we had made — the piece of ice in the fist you cannot hold or let go. (He weeps.)

— Tom Stoppard

Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.

— Tom Stoppard