Quotes by Tom Stoppard

About Tom Stoppard:

Sir Tom Stoppard is a British playwright, knighted in 1997. He has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. He co-wrote the screenplays for Brazil, The Russia House, and Shakespeare in Love, and has received one Academy Award and four Tony Awards. Themes of human rights, censorship and political freedom pervade his work along with exploration of linguistics and philosophy. Stoppard has been a key playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.

Tom Stoppard

I barely remembered my father; I'm confused between genuine memory and the few photographs that survived.

Tom Stoppard

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

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 can be affectionate about a lot of things without watching them.

Tom Stoppard

I actually went to an Oasis concert. I thought they were a brilliant songwriting band.

Tom Stoppard

I just happen to know quite a lot of what happened in Czechoslovakia between 1968 and the fall of Communism.

Tom Stoppard

The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.

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...

Tom Stoppard

'Arcadia' is obviously a play that's got interesting things in it that are perhaps quite hard to grasp.

Tom Stoppard

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

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

I'm aware of my old plays and occasionally think about them, but I'm much more anxious about finding the next play.

Tom Stoppard

The more doors there are for you to open, the better the play.

Tom Stoppard

I don't feel like a Londoner.

Tom Stoppard

Everybody I know is writing plays twice a year. It's sort of making me feel I am not up to much.

Tom Stoppard

I would count myself as a friend of Vaclav Havel.

Tom Stoppard

I think journalism is important.

Tom Stoppard

Very often in Chekhov, where he exhibits a little bit of human behavior that you recognize as true, you give a little laugh. It's like a reflex.

Tom Stoppard

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.

Tom Stoppard

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 st...

Tom Stoppard

Author Bio

  • NameTom Stoppard
  • DescriptionBritish playwright
  • BornJuly 3, 1937
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionPlaywright; Screenwriter; Journalist; Writer
  • AwardsLaurence Olivier Award; Commander Of The Order Of The British Empire; PEN Pinter Prize; Laurel Award For Screenwriting Achievement; Academy Award For Best Writing (Original Screenplay); Writers Guild Of America Award; Praemium Imperiale