Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" I write out of my intellectual experience. "
Tom Stoppard
Experience
Out
Write
Related Quotes:
" It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting. "
Tom Stoppard
Government
Democracy
Counting
" I am aware, as everybody has to be, that there's more competition for one's attention nowadays. "
Tom Stoppard
Attention
Competition
More
" Corporeal death is not the whole story. "
Tom Stoppard
Whole
Death
Story
" I'm not interested in clothes; I just like them. "
Tom Stoppard
Clothes
Not Interested
Like
" 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
More
Always
Economy
" If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older. "
Tom Stoppard
Childhood
Become
Older
" Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end? "
Tom Stoppard
Mean
Thought
Eternity
" I can be affectionate about a lot of things without watching them. "
Tom Stoppard
Watching
Lot
Things
" 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 and entertain. "
Tom Stoppard
Pressure
Purpose
Say
" 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. "
Tom Stoppard
Turtle
Now
Matters
" I just happen to know quite a lot of what happened in Czechoslovakia between 1968 and the fall of Communism. "
Tom Stoppard
Lot
Communism
Fall
" The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world. "
Tom Stoppard
Human
Being Human
World
" Schepisi is the sort of director who could, would, and frequently did phone me whenever he came across a textual problem. "
Tom Stoppard
Phone
He
Director
" 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. "
Tom Stoppard
You
World
Want
" 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
Live
Way
Safety
" I burn with no causes. "
Tom Stoppard
Causes
Burn
" Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power. "
Tom Stoppard
Right
Believe
Power
" 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. "
Tom Stoppard
Head
Top
Myself
" I think I'm a difficult conventional writer. "
Tom Stoppard
I Think
Difficult
Think
" Other people's lives come at us without a backstory most of the time. The present is like that. "
Tom Stoppard
Like
Without
Us
" In 2005, I got an email from Belarus Free Theatre. They were emailing playwrights in America and England announcing their existence and saying they would like support from us. I wrote back and asked if they wanted us to visit. They said, 'Yes, we'd love that.' "
Tom Stoppard
Theatre
America
Love
" 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
Important
Start
Doing
" 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. "
Tom Stoppard
Leave
Diary
Away
" I like trying to create a spark through a collaboration between me and the audience. "
Tom Stoppard
Spark
Trying
Me
" Any revival in which I am involved is liable to change. "
Tom Stoppard
Which
I Am
Change
" I'm a very boring person. "
Tom Stoppard
Person
Boring
Very
" 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
Now
World
Free
" Honesty is seldom ingratiating and often discomfiting. "
Tom Stoppard
Honesty
Often
Honesty Is
" Even when the writing seems very frivolous, I'm puritanical. I don't mean my subject matter. It's that I'm almost pathologically incapable of leaving something when I'm not quite happy with it. "
Tom Stoppard
Mean
Leaving
Matter
" 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
Talk
Problem
Line