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
In Chekhov, everything blends into its opposite, just fractionally, and this is sort of unsettling. And that's why you end up 100 years later asking, 'Is that moment tragic or comic?'
It's really hard to talk about writing, and I'm usually conscious if I'm misleading people or misleading the questioner, because the problem with writing is the next line.
It's very common for people to recommend something to me because they're going on what I've already written, when, what really is the case, is that you want to write about something you haven't written about, in ways that you haven't done before.
My family was in Singapore when the Japanese War started. We were in Singapore at the time of Pearl Harbor, and by the beginning of 1942, the Japanese invasion of Burma and Singapore had started.
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.
Possibly because I did start off as a journalist, my starting point has always been that you've got to keep an audience with you. Whatever you're doing, you always want a script to be a page-turner. It's very important never, ever, to feel above that.
The whole excitement for writing anything is quite intense. And for a day or two, you think you've done everything extremely well. The problems start on the third day, and continues for the rest of your life.
You can't go around chasing your own plays and showing up every time somebody does one somewhere. You just cross your fingers and hope that they're OK.
I barely remembered my father; I'm confused between genuine memory and the few photographs that survived.
When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need five days to get the world I've left out of my head and ten days or a fortnight not talking to anyone to hold what I need to hold inside my head.
The possibilities are infinite with new writing; every time you open a new script, there's no limit to what it might contain.
A free press needs to be a respected press.
If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation.
I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.