Tom Stoppard Quotes

Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes; it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.

Life is that perfect fine line between ironies.

There are gray areas in everything.

In any case, I would never make a film that was only one thing. Even if it's my warmest, most romantic film, I still want it to have the more cynical view of things, showing the irony and absurdity of things that we consider normal.

The acceptance of ambiguity implies more than the commonplace understanding that some good things and some bad things happen to us. It means that we know that good and evil are inextricably intermixed in human affairs; that they contain, and sometimes embrace, their opposites; that success may involve failure of a different kind, and failure may be a kind of triumph.

It's all very simple, or else it's all very complex, or perhaps it's neither, or both.

When I define polarities in my work, I actually create the space between things. I point to the question I am actually interested in, without naming it.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

Everything in life is gray, you know.

Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.

All people are paradoxical. No one is easily reducible, so I like characters who have contradictory impulses or shades of ambiguity. It's fun, and it's fun because it's hard.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

I like characters who are contradictory.

It's just something that's sort of funny, sort of not.

Even a sheet of paper has two sides.

The best ideas make you want to say 'yes' and 'no' in the same breath.

In contradiction and paradox, you can find truth.

Sometimes I wonder if the world is too interesting and too boring at the same time.

In general, I like contradictions and complex situations.

It took me a long time to learn both good and bad can exist simultaneously.

It's very human to try to put things into boxes, and it's hard for us to reconcile with grey areas, and yet somehow, that's the area I find the most poetic, the juiciest.

I have two answers to everything and one answer to nothing.

You can't take contradiction away. Part of the fun of it is that the contradiction never really quite goes away.

There is no idea that does not carry in itself a possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite.

So much of life is paradox. So much of life is neither one thing nor the other... it's both things at the same time.