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
They loved, and quarreled, and made up, and loved, and fought, and were true to each other and untrue. She made him the happiest man in the whole world and the most wretched, and after a few years she died, and then, when he was thirty, he died, too. But by that time Catullus had invented the love poem.
For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.
Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.
Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight. Equilibrium is pragmatic. You have to get everything into proportion. You compensate, rebalance yourself so that you maintain your angle to your world. When the world shifts, you shift.
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!
Words are sacred. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge the world a little.
I have two garden parties a year to avoid going out to dinner.
It's so great in the theater when everyone catches up on the truth.
the bewilderment and incomprehension of critics and audience.
Theatre probably originated without texts, but by the time we get to the classical Greek period, theatre has become text-based.
I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something that - even if it can't be quantitatively measured as other subjects - it's as fundamental to all education.
I'm not interested in clothes; I just like them.
I flinch when I see my name in the newspapers.