Tom Stoppard Quotes
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I've never written an original piece for film; all the original things I've done are for the stage.
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One of the nice things about the world of filmmaking is that you make friends in the business.
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You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?
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Once rehearsals are done the writer really doesn't have a function on the set. If the script is stabilized, then the writer becomes a celebrity tourist visiting the set, trying not to get in the way. It's very good for the ego, to go visit a film set if you are the writer, because they give you a special chair, and tell you where you can sit to watch the monitor. They make you feel special, but at the same time, they make it perfectly plain that you are irrelevant!
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The fact is that people are attracted to new work and by new work.
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In England the rich own the poor and the men own the women.
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Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.
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Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.
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If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that. But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.
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The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.
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Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins.
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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.
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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.
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Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.
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Death is the ultimate negative.
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You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form.
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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.
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Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.
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I like plays where people talk a lot. Conversation is sustained. Argument is sustained.
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...reality, the name we give to the common experience.
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The tragedy of journalism is that these are people doing their best work.
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When I think of how things could have turned out, I feel as if I've dodged, not just bullets, but 6mm shells.
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If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.
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I write out of my intellectual experience.