Tom Stoppard

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.

Get me inside any boardroom and I'll get any decision I want.

Nobody would be killed on the roads if the speed limit were 10 miles an hour.

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.'

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.

I would count myself as a friend of Vaclav Havel.

Life in a box is better than no life at all... I expect.

I'm very unhappy about my entire life if my writing is going wrong.

It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.

Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.

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.

In the end, my children put me on to Pink Floyd when they were teenagers.

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.

I take every possible side.

Directors sometimes have good ideas that I wished I'd had, not on rewriting but simply on staging.

From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

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.

The text loses its virginity simply by being staged: it's no longer the abstract ideal version; it's an event.

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.

I flinch when I see my name in the newspapers.

I don't think Stoppardian has a precise definition.

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.

A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.

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.

The idea that anybody might be allowed to use their common sense when clearly no harm is being done is part of history now.

A free press needs to be a respected press.

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.

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.

I don't do interviews under false pretenses.

A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set.

Good things, when short, are twice as good.

Corporeal death is not the whole story.

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.

My desk faces the water, and I'm perfectly happy sitting there. I'm never lonely.

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.

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.

Honesty is seldom ingratiating and often discomfiting.

I like trying to create a spark through a collaboration between me and the audience.

I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design.

Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.

The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.

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.

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?

I'm not that taken with Freudian perspectives. They seem to be overcomplicated.

I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.

People think I'm very nice, you know. And I'm not as nice as they think.

I wish I could remember how to write a play. I can't remember how they happened.

You should not translate for more than two hours at a time. After that, you lose your edge, the language becomes clumsy, rigid.

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.

I'm a conservative kind of person. I don't think rightwing is quite the same thing. But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament.

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.

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.

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.

When I was 20, the idea of having a play on anywhere was just beyond my dreams.

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.

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.

Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.

I don't believe that we evolved moral psychology; it just doesn't seem plausible to me as a biological phenomenon.

I feel overestimated.

I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn't wait to be out of education.

I think I enlist comedy to a serious purpose.

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.

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.

What Tolstoy is on about is that carnal love is not a good idea.

I don't even know what my voice is to this day.

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.

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.

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

When I think of how things could have turned out, I feel as if I've dodged, not just bullets, but 6mm shells.

I'm a very boring person.

One of the nice things about the world of filmmaking is that you make friends in the business.

'The Importance of Being Earnest' is important, but it says nothing about anything.

I seem to be failing in my intention to be as boring as I possibly can be for self-protection.

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.

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.

I get the impression sometimes that a play arrives in a sequence of events that I have no control over.

I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

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.

My life is sectioned off into hot flushes, pursuits of this or that.

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.

A circle is the longest distance to same point.

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.

I don't find it easy to think of good stuff to write about.

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.

Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?

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.

Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.

Lou Reed was a hero because he was an anti-hero.

The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.

My brain cells are dying in their trillions.

I don't feel that I belong anywhere. Or rather, if there's a place I belong, I don't feel I'm there.

I am aware, as everybody has to be, that there's more competition for one's attention nowadays.

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.'