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Tom Stoppard


English
July 3, 1937
Dramatist
nature landscape mountain travel
We're actors. We're the opposite of people.


Tom Stoppard
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Every exit is an entry somewhere else.


Tom Stoppard
surf water sea nature ocean blue
A free press needs to be a respected press.


Tom Stoppard
Tags: Free Needs Press
pirate ship dark night storm
Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.


Tom Stoppard
Tags: Age Very High
stamens flower bloom blossom
If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.


Tom Stoppard
Tags: You Your Never
ramsau hintersee bavaria
My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.


Tom Stoppard
Tags: Life Which Whole
rocky coast waves sea nature
I like plays where people talk a lot. Conversation is sustained. Argument is sustained.


Tom Stoppard
Tags: People Like Lot
sun beach summer ocean sea water
One doesn't want one's democracy to behave like a dictatorial or fascistic police. One doesn't.


Tom Stoppard
sunset denmark sea coast water
My desk faces the water, and I'm perfectly happy sitting there. I'm never lonely.


Tom Stoppard
Tags: Never Happy Water
Chekhov understood that people are mysterious and can't be reduced to what we nowadays call 'motivation.'
Tom Stoppard
sunset north sea sea abendstimmung
I don't think falling in love in Slovakia is much different from falling in love in Tunbridge Wells.


Tom Stoppard
Tags: Think Love Much
misurina dolomites landscape
If enough things that are untrue are said about you, no one will know what really is true.


Tom Stoppard
Tags: You About Really
I've voted in every election - not always for the same political party and never with any degree of enthusiasm.
Tom Stoppard
Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the playwright got there before we got there.
Tom Stoppard
Tags: Because Feel Got
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.
Tom Stoppard
Tags: Just Get New
The idea that public safety, the safety of the innocent, is an absolute which trumps every other consideration, is tacitly abandoned in the way we live.
Tom Stoppard
Tags: Way Which Other
If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation.
Tom Stoppard
Tags: Music History Age
Time is short, life is short, there's a lot to know. So I skip the entertainers in the newspaper now. I just haven't got time.
Tom Stoppard
Tags: Time Just Life
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.
Tom Stoppard
Tags: Life Being Am
I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.
Tom Stoppard
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.
Tom Stoppard
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.
Tom Stoppard
Tags: Work You Because
I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn't trust my own subjective responses.
Tom Stoppard
Tags: Trust Which Own
My family was in Singapore when the Japanese War started. We were in Singapore at the time of Pearl Harbor, and by the beginning of 1942, the Japanese invasion of Burma and Singapore had started.
Tom Stoppard
Tags: Time Family War
All your life, you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.
Tom Stoppard
Tags: Truth You Like
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.
Tom Stoppard
Tags: You Like Some
If you let the plot be determined by what you feel is in the character's mind at that point, it may not turn out to be a very good play, but at least it will be a play where people are behaving in a kind of truthful way.
Tom Stoppard
Tags: Good You People
When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need five days to get the world I've left out of my head and ten days or a fortnight not talking to anyone to hold what I need to hold inside my head.
Tom Stoppard
Tags: Just Get Out
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
Tags: Famous Who Really
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.
Tom Stoppard
Tags: Work Freedom Who
I feel that when I began writing, I had a need to know more about the play before I got into it. I think that's the way I was thinking. But my actual experience is that the best way to find out what the structure is, is by writing the play out laterally. You just have got to be brave enough to start without knowing where you are going.
Tom Stoppard