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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Tom Stoppard

Politics

Woman

Thought

" I have two garden parties a year to avoid going out to dinner. "

" I've seldom minded other people's opinions, but the other side of that coin is that I've seldom been interested by them, um their opinions about me I mean. "

Tom Stoppard

Coin

Mean

" 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. "

" When you write, it's making a certain kind of music in your head. There's a rhythm to it, a pulse, and on the whole, I'm writing to that drum rather than the psychological process. "

" In 2005, I got an email from Belarus Free Theatre. They were emailing playwrights in America and England announcing their existence and saying they would like support from us. I wrote back and asked if they wanted us to visit. They said, 'Yes, we'd love that.' "

" If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life. "

" The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and inform and even, one might say, elevate, has altered under commercial pressure, perhaps, into a different kind of purpose, which is to divert and distract and entertain. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much. "

" 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. "

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

" I consider myself to be a very fortunate person and to have led a very fortunate life. "

" I don't feel like a Londoner. "

Tom Stoppard

Feel

" I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen. "

" It's very common for people to recommend something to me because they're going on what I've already written, when, what really is the case, is that you want to write about something you haven't written about, in ways that you haven't done before. "

" Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life. "

Tom Stoppard

Being

Event

" I take every possible side. "

" The whole thing about writing a play is that it's all about controlling the flow of information traveling from the stage to the audience. It's a stream of information, but you've got your hand on the tap, and you control in which order the audience receives it and with what emphasis, and how you hold it all together. "

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

Tom Stoppard

People

Opposite

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

" 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. "

" I'm a very boring person. "

" I am not somebody who meets a man or a woman somewhere and feels like that is an incredible character that I must write into a play. "

Tom Stoppard

I Am

Play

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

" If I wanted to change the world, the last thing I would do is write a play. "