I can't remember what my first script was.
— Tom Stoppard
I don't keep a diary and I throw away nearly all the paper I might have kept. I don't keep an archive. There's something worrying about my make-up that I try to leave no trace of myself apart from my plays.
I read for interest and enjoyment, and when I cease to enjoy it I stop.
I feel overestimated.
The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It's essentially self-interested on the part of authority.
For a long time I managed to think two things simultaneously, that I am actually a good playwright, and that the next time I write a play I will be revealed as someone who is no good at all.
I don't think Stoppardian has a precise definition.
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.
I think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn't sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future.
From as long as, literally as far back as I can remember I've liked puns, word jokes, I can literally recall looking at a comic at the age of six or seven and I remember what I enjoyed and what it was precisely and how the joke worked.
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.
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.
I'm so grateful to grab hold of something that wants to be a play. It doesn't happen very often. I don't have unwritten plays waiting for their turn.
I burn with no causes.
I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.
The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.
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.
The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and inform and even, one might say, elevate, has altered under commercial pressure, perhaps, into a different kind of purpose, which is to divert and distract and entertain.
Any revival in which I am involved is liable to change.
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 like pop music. I consider rock 'n' roll to be a branch of pop music.
I'm hopeless at looking into myself and trying to see how things are working and why.
As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas. I have no illusions about that.
I'm offended by things and take pathetic little stands against them.
I'm a conservative kind of person. I don't think rightwing is quite the same thing. But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament.
Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.
I've got no interest in educating or instructing people.
The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.
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.
Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life.
If enough things that are untrue are said about you, no one will know what really is true.
Life in a box is better than no life at all... I expect.
Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking.
A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.
The fact is that people are attracted to new work and by new work.
I write out of my intellectual experience.
I'm attracted to the past.
I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn't wait to be out of education.
I'm vaguely embarrassed by myself sometimes.
If the audience is made to do not enough work, they resent it without knowing it. Too much and they get lost. There's a perfect pace to be found. And a perfect place that is different for every line of the play.
I've seldom minded other people's opinions, but the other side of that coin is that I've seldom been interested by them, um their opinions about me I mean.
I'm a very boring person.
I never had any frustration about writing uncredited. I always felt that the satisfaction of doing it was in the doing of it, really, and getting recognised by the small number of people that know what you did.
I take every possible side.
I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.
It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross.
We're actors. We're the opposite of people.
I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.
