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
The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.
The fact is that people are attracted to new work and by new work.
Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.
The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.
I'm a conservative kind of person. I don't think rightwing is quite the same thing. But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament.
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.
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.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
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.
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'm vaguely embarrassed by myself sometimes.
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.
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.
My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.