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" 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. "

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" 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

" One doesn't want one's democracy to behave like a dictatorial or fascistic police. One doesn't. "

" 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 bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means. "

" One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time. "

" You do know what's coming up when you're translating. I suppose the concentration, then, is on finding a formulation which is speakable and in character - and economical as well, actually. "

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

" My intention still is to write a play to commemorate, possibly rather skeptically, the 50th anniversary of the Russian revolution. I started it at the beginning of 1966, but confronted with the enormous importance and reality of that revolution, I absolutely boggle. I don't know what to do about it. "

" In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness. "

" You don't often get a proposal to do Tolstoy for a really interesting director - that's easy to say yes to. "

" Rewriting isn't just about dialogue; it's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene. "

" 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

Desire

End

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

" I am not a mathematician, but I was aware that for centuries, mathematics was considered the queen of the sciences because it claimed certainty. It was grounded on some fundamental certainties - axioms - that led to others. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" All of my scripts are based on other people's novels. Generally, I consider myself as one who writes for theatre. I do not see film work as a continuation of writing for theatre. It is more of an interruption of the writing process. "

" People have quite a simple idea about 'Anna Karenina.' They feel that the novel is entirely about a young married woman who falls in love with a cavalry officer and leaves her husband after much agony, and pays the price for that. "

" To wrap up the idea of 'Parade's End' in a sentence or two, I would say it's a love story in which we see a man with two women, and we know what's attractive about them. And we know why and what they feel about him. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" If I am on a journey where I only have time to read one-and-a-half books, I never know which one-and-a-half I'll feel like reading. So I bring eight. "

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

" The notion that the 'leader' has the right to ask huge sacrifices of your generation for a notional future paradise - if you'd be good enough to lie down under the wheels of the juggernaut - that sentimental and self-aggrandising rationalisation for brute force and cowardice I felt from adolescence was wrong. "

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

" When I was a reporter in Bristol, which I was between the years 1954 and 1960, the newspaper would get tickets for whoever showed up to play a gig at the big hall down the road, so I saw some wonderful people. The Everly Brothers, for example. "

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

" I like plays where people talk a lot. Conversation is sustained. Argument is sustained. "

" I barely remembered my father; I'm confused between genuine memory and the few photographs that survived. "

" I'm a very boring person. "