Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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

Think

Best

Brave

Related Quotes:

" We're actors. We're the opposite of people. "

Tom Stoppard

People

Opposite

" 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.' "

" 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 don't draw on my inner life in my work. "

" I'm hopeless at looking into myself and trying to see how things are working and why. "

" I'm not that taken with Freudian perspectives. They seem to be overcomplicated. "

" Obviously, you would give your life for your children, or give them the last biscuit on the plate. But to me, the trick in life is to take that sense of generosity between kin, make it apply to the extended family and to your neighbour, your village and beyond. "

Tom Stoppard

Children

Life

" If I see an actor in a role that is really terrifying, no matter how many times I meet him socially, I'm still frightened of him. I think he's going to hit me. "

Tom Stoppard

Matter

Meet

" The days of the digital watch are numbered. "

" Nobody would be killed on the roads if the speed limit were 10 miles an hour. "

" My brain cells are dying in their trillions. "

" To be 64 is appalling, so what does it matter being 65? "

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

" If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice. "

" Age is a very high price to pay for maturity. "

" The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages. "

" I don't feel like a Londoner. "

Tom Stoppard

Feel

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I don't respond well to the Olympic noise, which is the noise of nationalistic triumphalism. "

" The text loses its virginity simply by being staged: it's no longer the abstract ideal version; it's an event. "

" I don't keep a diary and I throw away nearly all the paper I might have kept. I don't keep an archive. There's something worrying about my make-up that I try to leave no trace of myself apart from my plays. "

" 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 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. "

" 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?' "

" That I have the right to express myself freely at all times in all circumstances entails the idea that free speech is a 'basic human right' possessed by each individual, and, as such, trumps the interests of the society or group, including my neighbour. "

" I wanted to be in the theater. It is simply the way I felt. "

" Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it. "

" I think I'm a difficult conventional writer. "

" 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 state isn't any longer perceived as an institution which exists to serve us. "