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" The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages. "

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" 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

" It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture. "

" I'm very unhappy about my entire life if my writing is going wrong. "

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

" I'm not interested in clothes; I just like them. "

Tom Stoppard

Clothes

Not Interested

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 write out of my intellectual experience. "

" My scripts are possibly too talkative. Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, 'Oh, for God's sake, shut up.' "

" After all these years, I definitely associate having a pen in my hand with having an ashtray just out of eye line. "

" I feel overestimated. "

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

" James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized. "

" Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self. "

" Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text. "

" I take every possible side. "

" The thing about talking about human rights is that when one bears in mind the sharp end of it, one does not want to worry too much about semantics. "

" 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. "

" My desk faces the water, and I'm perfectly happy sitting there. I'm never lonely. "

" 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. "

" I have about a dozen cassettes lying about which I use in random order. Very often, I pick up a cassette to dictate a letter, and I find my voice coming back at me with the lines of plays three years old. "

" 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. "

" One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you. "

" 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. "

" Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society. "

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

" The possibilities are infinite with new writing; every time you open a new script, there's no limit to what it might contain. "