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" 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. "

Tom Stoppard

Leader

Lie

Generation

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

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I burn with no causes. "

Tom Stoppard

Causes

Burn

" I never had any frustration about writing uncredited. I always felt that the satisfaction of doing it was in the doing of it, really, and getting recognised by the small number of people that know what you did. "

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

" I think journalism is important. "

" What is the society we wish to protect? Is it the society of complete surveillance for the commonwealth? Is this the wealth we seek to have in common - optimal security at the cost of maximal surveillance? "

" Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them. "

" We're actors. We're the opposite of people. "

Tom Stoppard

People

Opposite

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

" I'm a playwright who gets involved in movies when I'm not writing a play. "

" 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'm attracted to the past. "

Tom Stoppard

Past

Attracted

" Even when the writing seems very frivolous, I'm puritanical. I don't mean my subject matter. It's that I'm almost pathologically incapable of leaving something when I'm not quite happy with it. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very modern anger against anti-Semitism. "

" I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process. "

" I don't want to come over as some boringly self-deprecating person. But I don't see myself as a groundbreaking writer in the way plays are structured. "

" We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain. "

" 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. "

" Why should I write a play? I don't have to write a play, do I? But somehow, I think that's what I'm here for, so I'd better do it. "

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