Never believe in mirrors or newspapers.

The line reads as a compact warning against trusting mediated versions of reality. Mirrors offer an apparently objective image, yet they reverse, frame, and flatten; newspapers offer purported facts, yet they select, narrate, and bias. Paired together, they suggest that both personal self-knowledge (the mirror) and public knowledge (the press) are vulnerable to distortion. In Stoppard’s typical mode, the aphorism also has a theatrical edge: both mirrors and newspapers are props—surfaces that reflect or report rather than constitute truth—so the quote can be taken as skepticism toward representation itself, urging a more critical, interpretive stance toward what seems “given.”