Tom Stoppard

“Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”

“Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!”

“HENRY:Leave me out of it. They don’t count. Maybe Brodie got a raw deal, maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. It doesn’t count. He’s a lout with language. I can’t help somebody who thinks, or thinks he thinks, that editing a newspaper is censorship, or that throwing bricks is a demonstration while building tower blocks is social violence, or that unpalatable statement is provocation while disrupting the speaker is the exercise of free speech…Words don’t deserve that kind of malarkey. They’re innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they’re no good any more, and Brodie knocks their corners off. I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.Act II, Scene 5, HENRY and ANNIE”

“Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.”

“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.”

“It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.”