Tom Stoppard Quotes (254 quotes)

Picture of quotation author Tom Stoppard
„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.“
― Tom Stoppard ―
Picture of quotation author Tom Stoppard
„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.“
― Tom Stoppard ―
Picture of quotation author Tom Stoppard
„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.“
― Tom Stoppard ―
Picture of quotation author Tom Stoppard
„Quite early on, and certainly since I started writing, I found that philosophical questions occupied me more than any other kind. I hadn't really thought of them as being philosophical questions, but one rapidly comes to an understanding that philosophy's only really about two questions: 'What is true?' and 'What is good?'“
― Tom Stoppard ―
Picture of quotation author Tom Stoppard
„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.“
― Tom Stoppard ―
Picture of quotation author Tom Stoppard
„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.“
― Tom Stoppard ―
Picture of quotation author Tom Stoppard
„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.“
― Tom Stoppard ―
Picture of quotation author Tom Stoppard
„It's very common for people to recommend something to me because they're going on what I've already written, when, what really is the case, is that you want to write about something you haven't written about, in ways that you haven't done before.“
― Tom Stoppard ―
Picture of quotation author Tom Stoppard
„In Chekhov, everything blends into its opposite, just fractionally, and this is sort of unsettling. And that's why you end up 100 years later asking, 'Is that moment tragic or comic?'“
― Tom Stoppard ―
Picture of quotation author Tom Stoppard
„I've never really worked out this thought, and I don't know if I'm really conscious of it, but I can see there's an attraction about writing about a period that's over and isn't going to change colour while you look at it.“
― Tom Stoppard ―
Picture of quotation author Tom Stoppard
„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.“
― Tom Stoppard ―
Picture of quotation author Tom Stoppard
„I like dialogue that is slightly more brittle than life. I have always admired and wished to write one of those 1940s film scripts where every line is written with a sharpness and economy that is frankly artificial.“
― Tom Stoppard ―
Picture of quotation author Tom Stoppard
„I have about a dozen cassettes lying about which I use in random order. Very often, I pick up a cassette to dictate a letter, and I find my voice coming back at me with the lines of plays three years old.“
― Tom Stoppard ―
Picture of quotation author Tom Stoppard
„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.“
― Tom Stoppard ―
Picture of quotation author Tom Stoppard
„I don't believe there is something called 'film' and something called 'theater,' and that words belong in the theater. Some rather bad films have few words in them; some good films have a lot of words in them.“
― Tom Stoppard ―
Picture of quotation author Tom Stoppard
„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.“
― Tom Stoppard ―
Picture of quotation author Tom Stoppard
„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.“
― Tom Stoppard ―
Picture of quotation author Tom Stoppard
„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.“
― Tom Stoppard ―
Picture of quotation author Tom Stoppard
„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.“
― Tom Stoppard ―
Picture of quotation author Tom Stoppard
„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.“
― Tom Stoppard ―

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Author information

Tom Stoppard
Author born: July 03, 1937
Nationality: English
Author Profession: Dramatist

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