But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament. I don’t think rightwing is quite the same thing. I don’t act, I don’t direct, I don’t design. If an idea’s worth having once, it’s worth having twice. A child knows what is fair and isn’t fair, and justice derives from that knowledge. Tom Stoppardįor 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. ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ is important, but it says nothing about anything. I consider myself to be a very fortunate person and to have led a very fortunate life. I don’t think falling in love in Slovakia is much different from falling in love in Tunbridge Wells.

I mean, where’s it all going to end? Tom StoppardĪ healthy attitude is contagious but don’t wait to catch it from others. Tom StoppardĮternity’s a terrible thought. Life in a box is better than no life at all… I expect.

Tom StoppardĪge is a very high price to pay for maturity. The notion that the ‘leader’ has the right to ask huge sacrifices of your generation for a notional future paradise – if you’d be good enough to lie down under the wheels of the juggernaut – that sentimental and self-aggrandising rationalisation for brute force and cowardice I felt from adolescence was wrong. If it hangs on a wall it’s a painting, and if you can walk around it it’s a sculpture. It’s not the voting that’s democracy it’s the counting. The idea that public safety, the safety of the innocent, is an absolute which trumps every other consideration, is tacitly abandoned in the way we live. Good things, when short, are twice as good. So I skip the entertainers in the newspaper now. Time is short, life is short, there’s a lot to know. And when something nudges it into outline, it is like being ambushed by a grotesque. Tom StoppardĪll your life, you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity. I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon. Imagination without skill gives us modern art. Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets.

Tom stoppard quotes