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" When you try to grasp the way the Western world is going, you see that we are on a ratchet towards a surveillance state, which is coming to include the whole population in its surveillance. This is our reward for accepting the restraints on the way we live now. "

Tom Stoppard

Try

World

See

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" I'm a very boring person. "

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

" When I was 20, in 1957, and maybe you would say I was old enough to know better, but nevertheless, I was completely nuts about Buddy Holly. And I loved pop bands that had absolutely no intellectual pretensions whatsoever. I loved the Monkees. "

" Good things, when short, are twice as good. "

" I like trying to create a spark through a collaboration between me and the audience. "

Tom Stoppard

Spark

Trying

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

" Nobody would be killed on the roads if the speed limit were 10 miles an hour. "

" If I am on a journey where I only have time to read one-and-a-half books, I never know which one-and-a-half I'll feel like reading. So I bring eight. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" When I think of how things could have turned out, I feel as if I've dodged, not just bullets, but 6mm shells. "

" 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. "

" There are too many things I find it difficult to say 'no' to. "

" 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. "

" If I see an actor in a role that is really terrifying, no matter how many times I meet him socially, I'm still frightened of him. I think he's going to hit me. "

Tom Stoppard

Matter

Meet

" In the end, one has to feel lucky that things fell out O.K. I've felt that all the years I've been writing plays. "

" In my mind, I always knew what my father looked like. "

" The idea of the state is, or should be, a very limited, prescribed idea. The state looks after the defense of the realm, and other matters - raising revenue to pay for things which are for all of us, and so on. That idea has turned turtle now. The state isn't any longer perceived as an institution which exists to serve us. "

" Pink Floyd are one of a handful of bands I've listened to a lot and whose concerts I've been to. I love the experience. I don't dance; I just jig up and down like everybody else. "

Tom Stoppard

Experience

Dance

" I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn't trust my own subjective responses. "

" 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. "

" I don't believe there is something called 'film' and something called 'theater,' and that words belong in the theater. Some rather bad films have few words in them; some good films have a lot of words in them. "

" I can't remember what my first script was. "

" All your life, you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it is like being ambushed by a grotesque. "

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

Tom Stoppard

Being

Event

" 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 wish I could remember how to write a play. I can't remember how they happened. "

" A free press needs to be a respected press. "

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

Tom Stoppard

Good

Shown

" 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. "