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" When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need five days to get the world I've left out of my head and ten days or a fortnight not talking to anyone to hold what I need to hold inside my head. "

Tom Stoppard

Now

World

Free

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" If I hadn't left Czechoslovakia, I would have been dead. "

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

" Any revival in which I am involved is liable to change. "

" I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do. "

" One doesn't want one's democracy to behave like a dictatorial or fascistic police. One doesn't. "

" Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it. "

" As a child, I was airlifted out of the path of the Nazis. Unfortunately, I was parachuted into the path of the Japanese, but then I was airlifted again to India. "

" Obviously, you would give your life for your children, or give them the last biscuit on the plate. But to me, the trick in life is to take that sense of generosity between kin, make it apply to the extended family and to your neighbour, your village and beyond. "

Tom Stoppard

Children

Life

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

" You can't go around chasing your own plays and showing up every time somebody does one somewhere. You just cross your fingers and hope that they're OK. "

Tom Stoppard

Own

Hope

" Theater is still a medium which attracts young writers. You'd think that it would be all over by now, with television and film. But it's not. "

" The truth of the matter is that I used to be much more - as it were - shy. Now I don't care! "

" It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross. "

" It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing. "

" My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation for the next play or, ideally, into it. "

" I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory. "

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

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

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

" I'm attracted to the past. "

Tom Stoppard

Past

Attracted

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

" The whole excitement for writing anything is quite intense. And for a day or two, you think you've done everything extremely well. The problems start on the third day, and continues for the rest of your life. "

" I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design. "

" My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers. "

" I think I'm a difficult conventional writer. "

" I'm not one of those writers who insist they don't read reviews and don't care much about them. I do read them, and I do care about them, and they're not always what you want them to be in an ideal world. "

" I think of myself as a theater animal instead of an intellectual animal. "

" I am good at being shown something and counterpunching. "

Tom Stoppard

Good

Shown

" It is easily and often overlooked that when Thomas Jefferson asserted that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were inalienable human rights, he did so on the ground that they had been endowed by God, our Creator. "

" The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It's essentially self-interested on the part of authority. "