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Tom Stoppard

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Quotes
279

The whole thing about writing a play is that it's all about controlling the flow of information traveling from the stage to the audience. It's a stream of information, but you've got your hand on the tap, and you control in which order the audience receives it and with what emphasis, and how you hold it all together.
Tom Stoppard
Get me inside any boardroom and I'll get any decision I want.
Tom Stoppard
Nobody would be killed on the roads if the speed limit were 10 miles an hour.
Tom Stoppard
In 2005, I got an email from Belarus Free Theatre. They were emailing playwrights in America and England announcing their existence and saying they would like support from us. I wrote back and asked if they wanted us to visit. They said, 'Yes, we'd love that.'
Tom Stoppard
The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and inform and even, one might say, elevate, has altered under commercial pressure, perhaps, into a different kind of purpose, which is to divert and distract and entertain.
Tom Stoppard
I would count myself as a friend of Vaclav Havel.
Tom Stoppard
Life in a box is better than no life at all... I expect.
Tom Stoppard
I'm very unhappy about my entire life if my writing is going wrong.
Tom Stoppard
It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.
Tom Stoppard
Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.
Tom Stoppard
I think I give the impression of being a romantic, and I think inside I'm quite severe. But some might say they had the opposite impression of me.
Tom Stoppard
In the end, my children put me on to Pink Floyd when they were teenagers.
Tom Stoppard
Despite the digital age, there is a very large number of venues and spaces that are looking for plays, and many of them are looking for new plays.
Tom Stoppard
I take every possible side.
Tom Stoppard
Directors sometimes have good ideas that I wished I'd had, not on rewriting but simply on staging.
Tom Stoppard
From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.
Tom Stoppard
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
Tom Stoppard
I am not a mathematician, but I was aware that for centuries, mathematics was considered the queen of the sciences because it claimed certainty. It was grounded on some fundamental certainties - axioms - that led to others.
Tom Stoppard
The text loses its virginity simply by being staged: it's no longer the abstract ideal version; it's an event.
Tom Stoppard
In the period before the arrival of Mrs. Thatcher, politics had been in such low esteem. Everything was so hedged, so mealy-mouthed. Then along came this woman who seemed to have no manners at all and said exactly what she thought. Everyone's eyes were popping and their jaws were dropping, and I really enjoyed that.
Tom Stoppard
I flinch when I see my name in the newspapers.
Tom Stoppard
I don't think Stoppardian has a precise definition.
Tom Stoppard
My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.
Tom Stoppard
A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.
Tom Stoppard
It is no light matter to put in jeopardy a single life when it is the very singularity of each life which underpins the idea of a just society.
Tom Stoppard
The idea that anybody might be allowed to use their common sense when clearly no harm is being done is part of history now.
Tom Stoppard
A free press needs to be a respected press.
Tom Stoppard
In the end, one has to feel lucky that things fell out O.K. I've felt that all the years I've been writing plays.
Tom Stoppard
Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.
Tom Stoppard
I don't do interviews under false pretenses.
Tom Stoppard
A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set.
Tom Stoppard
Good things, when short, are twice as good.
Tom Stoppard
Corporeal death is not the whole story.
Tom Stoppard
I've seldom minded other people's opinions, but the other side of that coin is that I've seldom been interested by them, um their opinions about me I mean.
Tom Stoppard
My desk faces the water, and I'm perfectly happy sitting there. I'm never lonely.
Tom Stoppard
I don't want to come over as some boringly self-deprecating person. But I don't see myself as a groundbreaking writer in the way plays are structured.
Tom Stoppard
When you try to grasp the way the Western world is going, you see that we are on a ratchet towards a surveillance state, which is coming to include the whole population in its surveillance. This is our reward for accepting the restraints on the way we live now.
Tom Stoppard
Honesty is seldom ingratiating and often discomfiting.
Tom Stoppard
I like trying to create a spark through a collaboration between me and the audience.
Tom Stoppard
I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design.
Tom Stoppard
Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.
Tom Stoppard
The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world.
Tom Stoppard
There are certain sorts of jokes which have only to do with the substitution of the unexpected word in a familiar context. If you translated something into French and then had it translated back into English by somebody who didn't know the original, you'd lose what was funny.
Tom Stoppard
The whole excitement for writing anything is quite intense. And for a day or two, you think you've done everything extremely well. The problems start on the third day, and continues for the rest of your life.
Tom Stoppard
Like many people, I only knew of Ford Madox Ford through a book called 'The Good Soldier,' which is everybody's favorite Ford Madox Ford if they have one, but I came to read 'Parade's End' when it was suggested via Damien Timmer of Mammoth Screen.
Tom Stoppard
People have quite a simple idea about 'Anna Karenina.' They feel that the novel is entirely about a young married woman who falls in love with a cavalry officer and leaves her husband after much agony, and pays the price for that.
Tom Stoppard
I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.
Tom Stoppard
Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.
Tom Stoppard
The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.
Tom Stoppard
What is the society we wish to protect? Is it the society of complete surveillance for the commonwealth? Is this the wealth we seek to have in common - optimal security at the cost of maximal surveillance?
Tom Stoppard
I'm not that taken with Freudian perspectives. They seem to be overcomplicated.
Tom Stoppard
I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.
Tom Stoppard
People think I'm very nice, you know. And I'm not as nice as they think.
Tom Stoppard
I wish I could remember how to write a play. I can't remember how they happened.
Tom Stoppard
You should not translate for more than two hours at a time. After that, you lose your edge, the language becomes clumsy, rigid.
Tom Stoppard
For me, the reputation for teaching language in general, and East European languages most particularly, gave Glasgow University, and by reflection the country, a distinction.
Tom Stoppard
I'm a conservative kind of person. I don't think rightwing is quite the same thing. But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament.
Tom Stoppard
Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins.
Tom Stoppard
To wrap up the idea of 'Parade's End' in a sentence or two, I would say it's a love story in which we see a man with two women, and we know what's attractive about them. And we know why and what they feel about him.
Tom Stoppard
If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation.
Tom Stoppard
When I was 20, the idea of having a play on anywhere was just beyond my dreams.
Tom Stoppard
Every exit is an entry somewhere else.
Tom Stoppard
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.
Tom Stoppard
Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.
Tom Stoppard
I don't believe that we evolved moral psychology; it just doesn't seem plausible to me as a biological phenomenon.
Tom Stoppard
I feel overestimated.
Tom Stoppard
I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn't wait to be out of education.
Tom Stoppard
I think I enlist comedy to a serious purpose.
Tom Stoppard
When I was a reporter in Bristol, which I was between the years 1954 and 1960, the newspaper would get tickets for whoever showed up to play a gig at the big hall down the road, so I saw some wonderful people. The Everly Brothers, for example.
Tom Stoppard
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.
Tom Stoppard
What Tolstoy is on about is that carnal love is not a good idea.
Tom Stoppard
I don't even know what my voice is to this day.
Tom Stoppard
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
Tom Stoppard
The idea that public safety, the safety of the innocent, is an absolute which trumps every other consideration, is tacitly abandoned in the way we live.
Tom Stoppard
Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.
Tom Stoppard
When I think of how things could have turned out, I feel as if I've dodged, not just bullets, but 6mm shells.
Tom Stoppard
I'm a very boring person.
Tom Stoppard
One of the nice things about the world of filmmaking is that you make friends in the business.
Tom Stoppard
'The Importance of Being Earnest' is important, but it says nothing about anything.
Tom Stoppard
I seem to be failing in my intention to be as boring as I possibly can be for self-protection.
Tom Stoppard
When I was in my teens, I was very, very keen on being the author of a book. What the book was was secondary. I wanted it to be in hardback. I didn't care how thick or thin it was, and I didn't actually care what it was about.
Tom Stoppard
We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.
Tom Stoppard
I get the impression sometimes that a play arrives in a sequence of events that I have no control over.
Tom Stoppard
I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
Tom Stoppard
Writing a new play shouldn't be seen as a mystery belonging to a priesthood, but as a challenge, a technical challenge, just to get into it.
Tom Stoppard
My life is sectioned off into hot flushes, pursuits of this or that.
Tom Stoppard
If you let the plot be determined by what you feel is in the character's mind at that point, it may not turn out to be a very good play, but at least it will be a play where people are behaving in a kind of truthful way.
Tom Stoppard
A circle is the longest distance to same point.
Tom Stoppard
It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.
Tom Stoppard
I don't find it easy to think of good stuff to write about.
Tom Stoppard
All your life, you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.
Tom Stoppard
Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?
Tom Stoppard
Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.
Tom Stoppard
Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
Tom Stoppard
Lou Reed was a hero because he was an anti-hero.
Tom Stoppard
The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.
Tom Stoppard
My brain cells are dying in their trillions.
Tom Stoppard
I don't feel that I belong anywhere. Or rather, if there's a place I belong, I don't feel I'm there.
Tom Stoppard
I am aware, as everybody has to be, that there's more competition for one's attention nowadays.
Tom Stoppard
My scripts are possibly too talkative. Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, 'Oh, for God's sake, shut up.'
Tom Stoppard

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