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" I've never really worked out this thought, and I don't know if I'm really conscious of it, but I can see there's an attraction about writing about a period that's over and isn't going to change colour while you look at it. "

Tom Stoppard

Look

Know

Writing

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" When I was 20, the idea of having a play on anywhere was just beyond my dreams. "

" I don't look at my work in a critical or analytical way; I just don't think of myself objectively. It doesn't interest me. "

Tom Stoppard

Myself

Look

" You are the plays you write. How on earth could you write them otherwise? They're projections of your own predilections. "

" I don't know that I want to share all my most intimate secrets. "

" I am as miserable as anyone - sometimes. "

Tom Stoppard

Sometimes

Miserable

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

" I think I enlist comedy to a serious purpose. "

" Very often in Chekhov, where he exhibits a little bit of human behavior that you recognize as true, you give a little laugh. It's like a reflex. "

Tom Stoppard

Human

Laugh

" 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. "

" One of the nice things about the world of filmmaking is that you make friends in the business. Sometimes directors feel a script needs something, but they're not sure what it is, so they show it to a friend; if the friend is a writer, he ends up kicking around with that script for a while. "

" Despite the digital age, there is a very large number of venues and spaces that are looking for plays, and many of them are looking for new plays. "

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

" Honesty is seldom ingratiating and often discomfiting. "

" If I hadn't left Czechoslovakia, I would have been dead. "

" In the end, my children put me on to Pink Floyd when they were teenagers. "

" A free press needs to be a respected press. "

" Chekhov understood that people are mysterious and can't be reduced to what we nowadays call 'motivation.' "

" I like the notion of theater as recreational. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm not a theoretician about playwriting, but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitched - the scene, the line, the word - at the exact point where the audience has just the right amount of information. It's like Occam's razor. "

" I think journalism is important. "

" I write out of my intellectual experience. "

" The printed word is no longer as in demand as when I was of the age of pupils or even at the age of the teachers teaching them. "

" I would count myself as a friend of Vaclav Havel. "

" 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. "

" 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. "