Tom Stoppard
I actually went to an Oasis concert. I thought they were a brilliant songwriting band.
'The Importance of Being Earnest' is important, but it says nothing about anything.
If you don't know what is being said, the rest of the actor's work is wasted.
The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.
We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain.
The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world.
I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.
I consider myself to be a very fortunate person and to have led a very fortunate life.
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.
My brain cells are dying in their trillions.
I think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn't sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future.
The more doors there are for you to open, the better the play.
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.
From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.
I write out of my intellectual experience.
I feel overestimated.
The fact is that people are attracted to new work and by new work.
In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness.
I read for interest and enjoyment, and when I cease to enjoy it I stop.
I don't keep a diary and I throw away nearly all the paper I might have kept. I don't keep an archive. There's something worrying about my make-up that I try to leave no trace of myself apart from my plays.
I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking.
I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.
Theater is still a medium which attracts young writers. You'd think that it would be all over by now, with television and film. But it's not.
The idea of the state is, or should be, a very limited, prescribed idea. The state looks after the defense of the realm, and other matters - raising revenue to pay for things which are for all of us, and so on. That idea has turned turtle now. The state isn't any longer perceived as an institution which exists to serve us.
I'm aware of my old plays and occasionally think about them, but I'm much more anxious about finding the next play.
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.
The thing that happens remarkably often is that the people who are writing a dissertation believe they need to speak to me in order to do their dissertation. They need to interview me.
I'm not a theoretician about playwriting, but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitched - the scene, the line, the word - at the exact point where the audience has just the right amount of information. It's like Occam's razor.
I barely remembered my father; I'm confused between genuine memory and the few photographs that survived.
The notion that the 'leader' has the right to ask huge sacrifices of your generation for a notional future paradise - if you'd be good enough to lie down under the wheels of the juggernaut - that sentimental and self-aggrandising rationalisation for brute force and cowardice I felt from adolescence was wrong.
One senses that all the Bolsheviks, even those who ended up as cold-blooded autocrats, had been on a journey from idealism to something else, and didn't notice - to mix periods - when the Rubicon was crossed.
I adopted England as least as much as England adopted me.
The idea that anybody might be allowed to use their common sense when clearly no harm is being done is part of history now.
I don't even know what my voice is to this day.
I like trying to create a spark through a collaboration between me and the audience.
As a child, I was airlifted out of the path of the Nazis. Unfortunately, I was parachuted into the path of the Japanese, but then I was airlifted again to India.
One of the attractions of translating 'Heroes' is that it's not the kind of play that I write. If it had been, I probably wouldn't have wanted to translate it. There are no one-liners. It's much more a truthful comedy than a play of dazzling wit.
You should not translate for more than two hours at a time. After that, you lose your edge, the language becomes clumsy, rigid.
Corporeal death is not the whole story.
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.
I'm a playwright who gets involved in movies when I'm not writing a play.
I think I'm a difficult conventional writer.
I seem to be failing in my intention to be as boring as I possibly can be for self-protection.
I don't feel like a Londoner.
I don't respond well to the Olympic noise, which is the noise of nationalistic triumphalism.
To be in love with Debo Devonshire is hardly a distinction.
You end up going to school plays quite a bit as a parent, there are a lot of kids who are doing the job as well as they can, but there's always one or two who seem much more at home in the world of impersonation.
When 'The Dark Side of the Moon' was a new album in 1973, a friend of mine walked into my room where I was working with a copy in his hand and said, 'You really have to do a play about this album.'
I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don't feel Czech.