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" In the period before the arrival of Mrs. Thatcher, politics had been in such low esteem. Everything was so hedged, so mealy-mouthed. Then along came this woman who seemed to have no manners at all and said exactly what she thought. Everyone's eyes were popping and their jaws were dropping, and I really enjoyed that. "

Tom Stoppard

Politics

Woman

Thought

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" It takes a lot of effort to be vibrant. "

" One senses that all the Bolsheviks, even those who ended up as cold-blooded autocrats, had been on a journey from idealism to something else, and didn't notice - to mix periods - when the Rubicon was crossed. "

Tom Stoppard

Senses

Something

" The whole thing about writing a play is that it's all about controlling the flow of information traveling from the stage to the audience. It's a stream of information, but you've got your hand on the tap, and you control in which order the audience receives it and with what emphasis, and how you hold it all together. "

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

" I'm very garrulous, but I don't say anything. "

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

" I was so thrilled being a reporter, because it gave you the kind of access to people that you wouldn't ever get to meet. "

" If you are well known at something else, you get points for doing stuff which lots of other people do, and much more, and they don't get any points at all. You get over-praised, over-credited. "

" 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. "

" When I think of how things could have turned out, I feel as if I've dodged, not just bullets, but 6mm shells. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead. "

" Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. "

" I can't remember what my first script was. "

" I have two garden parties a year to avoid going out to dinner. "

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

Tom Stoppard

Absolutely

Said

" For me, human rights simply endorse a view of life and a set of moral values that are perfectly clear to an eight-year-old child. A child knows what is fair and isn't fair, and justice derives from that knowledge. "

" When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all. "

" The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world. "

" I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity. "

" Other people's lives come at us without a backstory most of the time. The present is like that. "

Tom Stoppard

Without

" To be in love with Debo Devonshire is hardly a distinction. "