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 like the notion of theater as recreational.
I'm aware of my old plays and occasionally think about them, but I'm much more anxious about finding the next play.
I'm a playwright who gets involved in movies when I'm not writing a play.
I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something that - even if it can't be quantitatively measured as other subjects - it's as fundamental to all education.
If you don't know what is being said, the rest of the actor's work is wasted.
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.
He's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it
Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.
Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very modern anger against anti-Semitism.
If I wanted to change the world, the last thing I would do is write a play.
If I am on a journey where I only have time to read one-and-a-half books, I never know which one-and-a-half I'll feel like reading. So I bring eight.
If I hadn't left Czechoslovakia, I would have been dead.
If I had been asked to write 1,200 words for a newspaper tomorrow, on any subject, I would just do it rather than leave a white hole in the page. And I think it's a very healthy attitude to take to writing anything.
I can be affectionate about a lot of things without watching them.