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" You do know what's coming up when you're translating. I suppose the concentration, then, is on finding a formulation which is speakable and in character - and economical as well, actually. "

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" 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? "

Tom Stoppard

Wish

Protect

Society

" Honesty is seldom ingratiating and often discomfiting. "

" Get me inside any boardroom and I'll get any decision I want. "

Tom Stoppard

Decision

Get

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

" Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end? "

" 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 don't know that I want to share all my most intimate secrets. "

" 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 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. "

" I seem to be failing in my intention to be as boring as I possibly can be for self-protection. "

" One senses that all the Bolsheviks, even those who ended up as cold-blooded autocrats, had been on a journey from idealism to something else, and didn't notice - to mix periods - when the Rubicon was crossed. "

Tom Stoppard

Senses

Something

" 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. "

" I'm attracted to the past. "

Tom Stoppard

Past

Attracted

" 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. "

" When I was a reporter in Bristol, which I was between the years 1954 and 1960, the newspaper would get tickets for whoever showed up to play a gig at the big hall down the road, so I saw some wonderful people. The Everly Brothers, for example. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm hopeless at looking into myself and trying to see how things are working and why. "

" If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older. "

" In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness. "

" I'm offended by things and take pathetic little stands against them. "

" I'm not like some other writers: I have no actual urgent need or desire to add to what's written. You write it; if you're lucky, it's performed, and that's the end of the whole thing. "

Tom Stoppard

Desire

End

" The more doors there are for you to open, the better the play. "

" The text loses its virginity simply by being staged: it's no longer the abstract ideal version; it's an event. "