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" 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. "

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" 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

Life

Eye

Blur

" 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. "

" A publisher many years ago asked if I'd like to write a novel for £50. And I said, 'Absolutely.' "

Tom Stoppard

Absolutely

Said

" 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. "

" I'm not one of those writers who insist they don't read reviews and don't care much about them. I do read them, and I do care about them, and they're not always what you want them to be in an ideal world. "

" Get me inside any boardroom and I'll get any decision I want. "

Tom Stoppard

Decision

Get

" If I had been asked to write 1,200 words for a newspaper tomorrow, on any subject, I would just do it rather than leave a white hole in the page. And I think it's a very healthy attitude to take to writing anything. "

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

" The way 'star' used to be reserved for a small number of people, and when the star category became so vast, they came up with 'superstar,' and then they came up with 'megastar.' "

" My desk faces the water, and I'm perfectly happy sitting there. I'm never lonely. "

" 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?' "

" I'm not interested in clothes; I just like them. "

Tom Stoppard

Clothes

Not Interested

" There are too many things I find it difficult to say 'no' to. "

" I get the impression sometimes that a play arrives in a sequence of events that I have no control over. "

" With plays that require any kind of reading program, I'm reading for a couple of years before using the material. "

" Directors sometimes have good ideas that I wished I'd had, not on rewriting but simply on staging. "

" It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting. "

" A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there. "

" My life is sectioned off into hot flushes, pursuits of this or that. "

" Although I don't examine myself in this respect, I would say, off the top of my head, that I've come to acknowledge my Czechness more as I get older. "

" I adopted England as least as much as England adopted me. "

Tom Stoppard

Least

England

" What is the society we wish to protect? Is it the society of complete surveillance for the commonwealth? Is this the wealth we seek to have in common - optimal security at the cost of maximal surveillance? "

" I am as miserable as anyone - sometimes. "

Tom Stoppard

Sometimes

Miserable

" 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 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. "

" When I was in my teens, I was very, very keen on being the author of a book. What the book was was secondary. I wanted it to be in hardback. I didn't care how thick or thin it was, and I didn't actually care what it was about. "

" My father was a doctor in Moravia, in the south of the country. There were a number of Jewish doctors in the hospital there, and at a certain point - almost too late, really, but in time - they were all sent overseas by their employer. "

" I am not somebody who meets a man or a woman somewhere and feels like that is an incredible character that I must write into a play. "

Tom Stoppard

I Am

Play

" Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it. "

" The thing that happens remarkably often is that the people who are writing a dissertation believe they need to speak to me in order to do their dissertation. They need to interview me. "