Tom Stoppard

"I will take his secret to the grave, telling people along the way. Betrayal is no sin if it is whimsical."

"Michael: "March here, march there, present arms, where's your cap?" — you've no idea, the whole Army's obsessed with playing at soldiers."

"When I was at school, on certain afternoons we all had to do what was called Labour — weeding, sweeping, sawing logs for the boiler-room, that sort of thing; but if you had a chit from Matron you were…"

"To dream of taking the sword in the breast, the bullet in the brain and wake up to find the world goes wretchedly on and you will die of age and not of pain."

"I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to the death your right to say it."

"The Church's idea of the good and the beautiful excludes sexual aberration, apart from chastity, I suppose because it's the rarest"

"There is presumably a calendar date — a moment — when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, secretly, the noes had it."

"Guppy, Shusha . "Tom Stoppard, The Art of Theater No. 7", Paris Review interview"