Tom Stoppard
Get me inside any boardroom and I'll get any decision I want.
If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.
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.
The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.
It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross.
If enough things that are untrue are said about you, no one will know what really is true.
I burn with no causes.
Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life.
I'm so grateful to grab hold of something that wants to be a play. It doesn't happen very often. I don't have unwritten plays waiting for their turn.
I take every possible side.
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.
You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form.
I never had any frustration about writing uncredited. I always felt that the satisfaction of doing it was in the doing of it, really, and getting recognised by the small number of people that know what you did.
The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.
I was so thrilled being a reporter, because it gave you the kind of access to people that you wouldn't ever get to meet.
I'm a very boring person.
I've got no interest in educating or instructing people.
From as long as, literally as far back as I can remember I've liked puns, word jokes, I can literally recall looking at a comic at the age of six or seven and I remember what I enjoyed and what it was precisely and how the joke worked.
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.
Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.
If the audience is made to do not enough work, they resent it without knowing it. Too much and they get lost. There's a perfect pace to be found. And a perfect place that is different for every line of the play.
I'm a conservative kind of person. I don't think rightwing is quite the same thing. But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament.
My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation for the next play or, ideally, into it.
I'm vaguely embarrassed by myself sometimes.
I don't think Stoppardian has a precise definition.
I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn't wait to be out of education.
As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas. I have no illusions about that.
I'm attracted to the past.
The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It's essentially self-interested on the part of authority.
It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.Collection: Matter
Words are sacred. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge the world a little.Collection: Order
It's no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst.Collection: Baby
We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.Collection: Inspirational
Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a childCollection: Children
Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.Collection: Children
Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.Collection: Christian
It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.Collection: Heart
Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight.Collection: Happiness
There's something scary about stupidity made coherent.Collection: Stupid
Never believe in mirrors or newspapers.Collection: Wise
If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that. But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.Collection: Tuesday
I think theater ought to be theatrical ... you know, shuffling the pack in different ways so that it's -- there's always some kind of ambush involved in the experience. You're being ambushed by an unexpected word, or by an elephant falling out of the cupboard, whatever it is.Collection: Fall
Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.Collection: Art
I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.Collection: Beauty
I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.Collection: Writing
Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos.Collection: Hope
An artist is the magician put among men to gratify - capriciously - their urge for immortality.Collection: Artist
I will take his secret to the grave, telling people I meet on the way.Collection: People
Player: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life question your sitution at every turn.Collection: Player