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 am as miserable as anyone - sometimes.
I am not somebody who meets a man or a woman somewhere and feels like that is an incredible character that I must write into a play.
I'm not interested in clothes; I just like them.
In my mind, I always knew what my father looked like.
In 2005, I got an email from Belarus Free Theatre. They were emailing playwrights in America and England announcing their existence and saying they would like support from us. I wrote back and asked if they wanted us to visit. They said, 'Yes, we'd love that.'
I have two garden parties a year to avoid going out to dinner.
The truth is always a compound of two half-truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say
I'm a very boring person.
If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.
Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos.
We've traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.
It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing.
Information is light. Information in itself, about anything, is light.
It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.