Tom Stoppard
I wanted to be in the theater. It is simply the way I felt.
In my mind, I always knew what my father looked like.
Success is a sort of metaphysical experience. I live exactly as I did before - only on a slightly bigger scale. Naturally, I won't be corrupted. I'll sit there in my Rolls, uncorrupted, and tell my chauffeur, uncorruptedly, where to go.
I think I enlist comedy to a serious purpose.
What Tolstoy is on about is that carnal love is not a good idea.
The truth of the matter is that I used to be much more - as it were - shy. Now I don't care!
Everybody I know is writing plays twice a year. It's sort of making me feel I am not up to much.
I am aware, as everybody has to be, that there's more competition for one's attention nowadays.
The printed word is no longer as in demand as when I was of the age of pupils or even at the age of the teachers teaching them.
Even when the writing seems very frivolous, I'm puritanical. I don't mean my subject matter. It's that I'm almost pathologically incapable of leaving something when I'm not quite happy with it.
I'm very unhappy about my entire life if my writing is going wrong.
People think I'm very nice, you know. And I'm not as nice as they think.
I don't find it easy to think of good stuff to write about.
When I was 20, the idea of having a play on anywhere was just beyond my dreams.
I think theater ought to be theatrical.
When you write, it's making a certain kind of music in your head. There's a rhythm to it, a pulse, and on the whole, I'm writing to that drum rather than the psychological process.
I wish I could remember how to write a play. I can't remember how they happened.
There are too many things I find it difficult to say 'no' to.
The thing about talking about human rights is that when one bears in mind the sharp end of it, one does not want to worry too much about semantics.
I don't believe that we evolved moral psychology; it just doesn't seem plausible to me as a biological phenomenon.
If I hadn't left Czechoslovakia, I would have been dead.
To be 64 is appalling, so what does it matter being 65?
My desk faces the water, and I'm perfectly happy sitting there. I'm never lonely.
I'm not interested in clothes; I just like them.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
I just happen to know quite a lot of what happened in Czechoslovakia between 1968 and the fall of Communism.
A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.
Any revival in which I am involved is liable to change.
I'm not like some other writers: I have no actual urgent need or desire to add to what's written. You write it; if you're lucky, it's performed, and that's the end of the whole thing.
Somebody who likes to do my plays is a good director for them.
Possibly because I did start off as a journalist, my starting point has always been that you've got to keep an audience with you. Whatever you're doing, you always want a script to be a page-turner. It's very important never, ever, to feel above that.
When I think of how things could have turned out, I feel as if I've dodged, not just bullets, but 6mm shells.
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.
It's really hard to talk about writing, and I'm usually conscious if I'm misleading people or misleading the questioner, because the problem with writing is the next line.
I can't remember what my first script was.
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.
I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.
For a long time I managed to think two things simultaneously, that I am actually a good playwright, and that the next time I write a play I will be revealed as someone who is no good at all.
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.
It takes a lot of effort to be vibrant.
'Arcadia' is obviously a play that's got interesting things in it that are perhaps quite hard to grasp.
I'm hopeless at looking into myself and trying to see how things are working and why.
James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.
One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you.
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.
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.'
Like most writers, I just create because I have a story to tell, really.
It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.