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" The way 'star' used to be reserved for a small number of people, and when the star category became so vast, they came up with 'superstar,' and then they came up with 'megastar.' "

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" In January 1962, when I was the author of one and a half unperformed plays, I attended a student production of 'The Birthday Party' at the Victoria Rooms in Bristol. Just before it began, I realised that Harold Pinter was sitting in front of me. "

Tom Stoppard

Sitting

Birthday

" If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice. "

" Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art. "

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

" It takes a lot of effort to be vibrant. "

" 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 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

" 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. "

" From as long as, literally as far back as I can remember I've liked puns, word jokes, I can literally recall looking at a comic at the age of six or seven and I remember what I enjoyed and what it was precisely and how the joke worked. "

" My family was in Singapore when the Japanese War started. We were in Singapore at the time of Pearl Harbor, and by the beginning of 1942, the Japanese invasion of Burma and Singapore had started. "

" 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. "

" My brain cells are dying in their trillions. "

" I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity. "

" Like most writers, I just create because I have a story to tell, really. "

" I don't feel that I belong anywhere. Or rather, if there's a place I belong, I don't feel I'm there. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I like plays where people talk a lot. Conversation is sustained. Argument is sustained. "

" I've got no interest in educating or instructing people. "

" There are many, many more small theater spaces than there were when I was starting out. "

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

Tom Stoppard

Clothes

Not Interested

" 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. "

" It is no light matter to put in jeopardy a single life when it is the very singularity of each life which underpins the idea of a just society. "

" A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set. "

" If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation. "

" I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 read for interest and enjoyment, and when I cease to enjoy it I stop. "