Life is a gamble, at terrible odds—if it was a bet you wouldn’t take it

 Here are some widely quoted and well-known lines from Tom Stoppard, drawn from his plays, essays, and interviews. Stoppard’s work is rich, witty, and philosophical, so many of these have become quite famous:

Top Tom Stoppard Quotes

From Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)

• “Life is a gamble, at terrible odds—if it was a bet you wouldn’t take it.”
• “We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke.”
• “Every exit is an entry somewhere else.”
• “There is an art to the building up of suspense.”

From Arcadia (1993)

• “It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”
• “We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms.”
• “The future is disorder.”

From The Real Thing (1982)

• “Love is the hardest thing to get right in writing. It’s the only thing that matters.”
• “It’s no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst.”
• “Words… are innocent, neutral, precise… It’s the writer who makes them good or bad.”

From Jumpers (1972)

• “It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.”

From Travesties (1974)

• “If you’re going to commit a crime, it’s not the best time to be caught.”
• “A memory is a souvenir of something that never happened.”

From Interviews / Essays

• “Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.”
• “I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.”

If you’d like, I can also provide:

✔ a themed list (funniest, most philosophical, etc.)

✔ quotes only from specific plays

✔ deeper explanations of each quote or its context