Tom Stoppard
Tom Stoppard
Sir Tom Stoppard OM CBE FRSLis a British playwright and screenwriter, knighted in 1997. He has written prolifically for TV, radio, film and stage, finding prominence with plays such as Arcadia, The Coast of Utopia, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, Professional Foul, The Real Thing, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. He co-wrote the screenplays for Brazil, The Russia House, and Shakespeare in Love, and has received one Academy Award and four Tony Awards. Themes of human rights, censorship and...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth3 July 1937
CityZlin, Czech Republic
I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn't trust my own subjective responses.
It is no light matter to put in jeopardy a single life when it is the very singularity of each life which underpins the idea of a just society.
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.
All of my scripts are based on other people's novels. Generally, I consider myself as one who writes for theatre. I do not see film work as a continuation of writing for theatre. It is more of an interruption of the writing process.
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.
A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set.
You should not translate for more than two hours at a time. After that, you lose your edge, the language becomes clumsy, rigid.
Despite the digital age, there is a very large number of venues and spaces that are looking for plays, and many of them are looking for new plays.
'Arcadia' is obviously a play that's got interesting things in it that are perhaps quite hard to grasp.
As a writer, Harold has been unswerving for 50 years,
Somebody who likes to do my plays is a good director for them.
The more doors there are for you to open, the better the play.
After all these years, I definitely associate having a pen in my hand with having an ashtray just out of eye line.
I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.