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" 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. "

Tom Stoppard

Why

Original

Date

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" I am aware, as everybody has to be, that there's more competition for one's attention nowadays. "

Tom Stoppard

Attention

Competition

" My brain cells are dying in their trillions. "

" Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up. "

" 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. "

" If enough things that are untrue are said about you, no one will know what really is true. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" To be 64 is appalling, so what does it matter being 65? "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" One always likes to think that other countries are not like one's own. "

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

" 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. "

" My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful. "

" 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. "

" If you let the plot be determined by what you feel is in the character's mind at that point, it may not turn out to be a very good play, but at least it will be a play where people are behaving in a kind of truthful way. "

" Personally, I read reviews because I'm interested by them, but they don't have utility for me. "

Tom Stoppard

Interested

Reviews

" For me, the reputation for teaching language in general, and East European languages most particularly, gave Glasgow University, and by reflection the country, a distinction. "

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

" 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. "

" I think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn't sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future. "

" I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don't feel Czech. "

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

" I think probably I've been influenced by Chekhov and Walt Disney, if you see what I mean. "

" 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. "

" There are certain sorts of jokes which have only to do with the substitution of the unexpected word in a familiar context. If you translated something into French and then had it translated back into English by somebody who didn't know the original, you'd lose what was funny. "

" I don't think Stoppardian has a precise definition. "

" 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. "