Tom Stoppard Quotes

An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' - it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

The story does what no theorem can quite do. It may not be "like real life" in the superficial sense: but it sets before us an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region.

I made the choice long ago to write about real life. And life is both serious and funny.

We're always just telling stories, and stories are always just approximations of the truth. It's never the truth exactly.

The fact is fiction is always a representation of life, sometimes the lives of famous people.

There is properly no history; only biography.

To me a photograph is a page from life, and that being the case, it must be real.

Someone calls biography the home aspect of history.

There is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.

Real life seems to have no plots.

There’s only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke: how it is. In all the arts, the payoff is always the same: recognition. If it works, you say that’s real, that’s truth, that’s life, that’s the way things are. ‘There it is.’

It was good, it was bad. But it was real, and that's all you have.

Among its many other obligations, fiction always has to be believable. Life does not have to suffer such constraint, and much of what takes place is believable only because it happens.

Of all forms of fiction, autobiography is the most gratuitous.

How can a motion picture reflect real life when it is made by people who are living artificial lives?

Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. I know what he means, and I agree.

Mostly what happens in the novels never happened in real life.

Most people when they have autobiographies, they're not autobiographies, they're biographies written by a ghost writer.

I have no plans to write an autobiography, I will leave that to others. I'm sure they will turn me into a homosexual or a Nazi spy or something else.

Biography is the best form of history.

So you want another story?" Uhh... no. We would like to know what really happened." Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?" Uhh... perhaps in English. In Japanese a story would have an element of invention in it. We don't want any invention. We want the 'straight facts,' as you say in English." Isn't telling about something--using words, English or Japanese--already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?

Dreams? If only they had been! But I don't need dreams, Doctor, that's why I hardly have them—because I have this life instead. With me it all happens in broad daylight!

We have, each of us, a life story, whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives.