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
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything... death is not... It's the absence of presence, nothing more... the endless time of never coming back... a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes not sound...
To be frank: the translations that often sound bad in the mouths of the actors, these have often been done by linguists.
Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.
I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.
I don't write at the library, because I smoke when I work or would like the possibility of a smoke. Also, I need to be at my own desk.
Autumnal -- nothing to do with leaves. It is to do with a certain brownness at the edges of the day ... Brown is creeping up on us, take my word for it ... Russets and tangerine shades of old gold flushing the very outside edge of the senses... deep shining ochres, burnt umber and parchments of baked earth -- reflecting on itself and through itself, filtering the light. At such times, perhaps, coincidentally, the leaves might fall, somewhere, by repute. Yesterday was blue, like smoke.
Words are sacred. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge the world a little.
Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.
I smoke too much whether it's going well or badly. After all these years, I definitely associate having a pen in my hand with having an ashtray just out of eye line.
It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.
Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child
Every exit is an entry somewhere else.