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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I was so thrilled being a reporter, because it gave you the kind of access to people that you wouldn't ever get to meet.
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In England the rich own the poor and the men own the women.
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The fact is that people are attracted to new work and by new work.
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Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat? Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat. Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats. Guildenstern: No, no, no--what you've been is not on boats.
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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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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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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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Death is the ultimate negative.
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Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.
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Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.
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The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.
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Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.
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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 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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I like plays where people talk a lot. Conversation is sustained. Argument is sustained.
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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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...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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If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.
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It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.
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I really love being in postproduction. First of all, it's all quite self-interested: You can protect things.