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
After all these years, I definitely associate having a pen in my hand with having an ashtray just out of eye line.
Somebody who likes to do my plays is a good director for them.
The sense of suppression, ... or self-suppression, and pressure generally which came off even this photograph of the page of this diary was so strong and so moving. There was a love story here.
The thing about talking about human rights is that when one bears in mind the sharp end of it, one does not want to worry too much about semantics.
I wanted to be in the theater. It is simply the way I felt.
Schepisi is the sort of director who could, would, and frequently did phone me whenever he came across a textual problem.
Quite early on, and certainly since I started writing, I found that philosophical questions occupied me more than any other kind. I hadn't really thought of them as being philosophical questions, but one rapidly comes to an understanding that philosophy's only really about two questions: 'What is true?' and 'What is good?'
The more doors there are for you to open, the better the play.
Despite the digital age, there is a very large number of venues and spaces that are looking for plays, and many of them are looking for new plays.
You should not translate for more than two hours at a time. After that, you lose your edge, the language becomes clumsy, rigid.
There are many, many more small theater spaces than there were when I was starting out.
'Shakespeare in Love' was a particularly happy film.
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.