What are some quotes from Travesties by Tom Stoppard?

For every thousand people, there’s nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who’s the artist.

This is Henry Carr, providing, as most of the characters of Travesties do, a perceptive insight into the nature of artistic creation. There is an element of luck involved in being a great artist. Many perfectly talented artists toil away for years without every achieving any success. Perhaps there's an element of jealousy here. Henry is something of an actor manqué, so naturally he feels more than a twinge of resentment towards those like Joyce who've made it.

[T]he odd thing about revolution is that the further left you go politically the more bourgeois they like their art. (Tristan Tzara)

A running theme of the play is the relationship between art and politics. Both Tzara and Joyce are, in their own individual ways, revolutionaries in art. Lenin, however, although a political revolutionary, is something of a reactionary when it comes to art.

An artist is the magician put among men to gratify—capriciously—their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships—and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes—husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer . . .  (James Joyce)

Joyce clearly has a very elevated conception of the artist's role. Amidst all the endless chaos, bloodshed and suffering of human history, it's the artist who makes sense of it all, creating works of art that will forever endure. Historical events may come and go, but the art salvaged from the wreckage of the ages will aspire to the condition of immortality.

Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does.

Tristan Tzara, on the other hand, sees art purely in terms of shock value. A man may be an artist by "exhibiting his hindquarters."

I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you’re either a revolutionary or you’re not, and if you’re not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can’t be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary . . . I forget the third thing.

This is Henry Carr again, his declining memory failing him once more right at the end of the play. Thank goodness he managed to write down at least two of the insights he claims to have learned. What he seems to be driving at, in his own confused, convoluted manner, is that art and political revolution have some kind of family resemblance. Both set out to change the world in their own way. And if you can't (or won't) change the world in one way, then you might as well try the other.