Tom Stoppard

"Age is a very high price to pay for maturity."

"Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the playwright got there before we got there."

"Real data is messy. ...It's all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it's playing your song, but unfortunately it's out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk- I mean, the noise! Impossible!"

"I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn't trust my own subjective responses."

"Success is a sort of metaphysical experience. I live exactly as I did before - only on a slightly bigger scale. Naturally, I won't be corrupted. I'll sit there in my Rolls, uncorrupted, and tell my chauffeur, uncorruptedly, where to go."

"Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe."