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
Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.
Writing a play is like smashing that [glass] ashtray, filming it in slow motion, and then running the film in reverse, so that the fragments of rubble appear to fly together. You start - or at least I start - with the rubble.
If you took away everything in the world that had to be invented, there'd be nothing left except a lot of people getting rained on.
If rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!
You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?
There is presumably a calendar date a moment when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, secretly, the noes had it.
It seems pointless to be quoted if one isn't going to be quotable ... it's better to be quotable than honest.
If you were handed power on a plate you'd be left fighting over a plate.
Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.
Maybe Napoleon was wrong when he said we were a nation of shopkeepers... Today England looked like a nation of goalkeepers.
ROS: Why don't you go and have a look? GUIL: Pragmatism?! - is that all you have to offer?
What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?
Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn't death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees but it doesn't bring death home to anyone- it doesn't catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says- 'One day you are going to die.
Give us this day our daily mask.