Top 475 Quotes & Sayings by Tom Stoppard - Page 3

I don't find it easy to think of good stuff to write about.

Success is a sort of metaphysical experience. I live exactly as I did before - only on a slightly bigger scale. Naturally, I won't be corrupted. I'll sit there in my Rolls, uncorrupted, and tell my chauffeur, uncorruptedly, where to go.

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

I am aware, as everybody has to be, that there's more competition for one's attention nowadays.

My intention still is to write a play to commemorate, possibly rather skeptically, the 50th anniversary of the Russian revolution. I started it at the beginning of 1966, but confronted with the enormous importance and reality of that revolution, I absolutely boggle. I don't know what to do about it.

You should not translate for more than two hours at a time. After that, you lose your edge, the language becomes clumsy, rigid.

Even when the writing seems very frivolous, I'm puritanical. I don't mean my subject matter. It's that I'm almost pathologically incapable of leaving something when I'm not quite happy with it.

I don't feel that I belong anywhere. Or rather, if there's a place I belong, I don't feel I'm there.

My desk faces the water, and I'm perfectly happy sitting there. I'm never lonely.

To be 64 is appalling, so what does it matter being 65?

I think theater ought to be theatrical.

I don't respond well to the Olympic noise, which is the noise of nationalistic triumphalism.

The thing about talking about human rights is that when one bears in mind the sharp end of it, one does not want to worry too much about semantics.

I don't draw on my inner life in my work.

I've voted in every election - not always for the same political party and never with any degree of enthusiasm.

Like most writers, I just create because I have a story to tell, really.

For me, human rights simply endorse a view of life and a set of moral values that are perfectly clear to an eight-year-old child. A child knows what is fair and isn't fair, and justice derives from that knowledge.

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

I flinch when I see my name in the newspapers.

You end up going to school plays quite a bit as a parent, there are a lot of kids who are doing the job as well as they can, but there's always one or two who seem much more at home in the world of impersonation.

I'm very unhappy about my entire life if my writing is going wrong.

I always loved rock 'n' roll.

I don't feel like a Londoner.

I'm a playwright who gets involved in movies when I'm not writing a play.

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

One of the attractions of translating 'Heroes' is that it's not the kind of play that I write. If it had been, I probably wouldn't have wanted to translate it. There are no one-liners. It's much more a truthful comedy than a play of dazzling wit.

People think I'm very nice, you know. And I'm not as nice as they think.

Although I don't examine myself in this respect, I would say, off the top of my head, that I've come to acknowledge my Czechness more as I get older.

I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don't feel Czech.

My life is sectioned off into hot flushes, pursuits of this or that.

I wanted to be in the theater. It is simply the way I felt.

I think I enlist comedy to a serious purpose.

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.

Everybody I know is writing plays twice a year. It's sort of making me feel I am not up to much.

What Tolstoy is on about is that carnal love is not a good idea.

It takes a lot of effort to be vibrant.

When I was 20, the idea of having a play on anywhere was just beyond my dreams.

When you write, it's making a certain kind of music in your head. There's a rhythm to it, a pulse, and on the whole, I'm writing to that drum rather than the psychological process.

I've never really worked out this thought, and I don't know if I'm really conscious of it, but I can see there's an attraction about writing about a period that's over and isn't going to change colour while you look at it.

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

I like the notion of theater as recreational.

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.

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.

Corporeal death is not the whole story.

I don't want to come over as some boringly self-deprecating person. But I don't see myself as a groundbreaking writer in the way plays are structured.

I think I'm a difficult conventional writer.

I have a spasm of envy for the person that was killed by a falling bookcase, as long as it doesn't happen prematurely.

I don't believe that we evolved moral psychology; it just doesn't seem plausible to me as a biological phenomenon.

Lou Reed was a hero because he was an anti-hero.

When 'The Dark Side of the Moon' was a new album in 1973, a friend of mine walked into my room where I was working with a copy in his hand and said, 'You really have to do a play about this album.'

I'm not interested in clothes; I just like them.

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

The printed word is no longer as in demand as when I was of the age of pupils or even at the age of the teachers teaching them.

I don't think falling in love in Slovakia is much different from falling in love in Tunbridge Wells.

When I was in my teens, I was very, very keen on being the author of a book. What the book was was secondary. I wanted it to be in hardback. I didn't care how thick or thin it was, and I didn't actually care what it was about.

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.

To be in love with Debo Devonshire is hardly a distinction.

Quite early on, and certainly since I started writing, I found that philosophical questions occupied me more than any other kind. I hadn't really thought of them as being philosophical questions, but one rapidly comes to an understanding that philosophy's only really about two questions: 'What is true?' and 'What is good?'

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

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