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 don't feel that I belong anywhere. Or rather, if there's a place I belong, I don't feel I'm there.
I don't find it easy to think of good stuff to write about.
I don't draw on my inner life in my work.
I don't know that I want to share all my most intimate secrets.
I don't believe that we evolved moral psychology; it just doesn't seem plausible to me as a biological phenomenon.
I am aware, as everybody has to be, that there's more competition for one's attention nowadays.
I am good at being shown something and counterpunching.
My life is sectioned off into hot flushes, pursuits of this or that.
One senses that all the Bolsheviks, even those who ended up as cold-blooded autocrats, had been on a journey from idealism to something else, and didn't notice - to mix periods - when the Rubicon was crossed.
One always likes to think that other countries are not like one's own.
One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you.
One doesn't want one's democracy to behave like a dictatorial or fascistic police. One doesn't.
Personally, I read reviews because I'm interested by them, but they don't have utility for me.
My scripts are possibly too talkative. Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, 'Oh, for God's sake, shut up.'