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
On the one hand, it makes life very difficult for them. On the other hand - and this isn't a recommendation for being a suppressed writer - in their situation now, as with Havel and his friends in the '70s and '80s, the consolation is that your work matters.
I am not somebody who meets a man or a woman somewhere and feels like that is an incredible character that I must write into a play.
You should not translate for more than two hours at a time. After that, you lose your edge, the language becomes clumsy, rigid.
'Arcadia' is obviously a play that's got interesting things in it that are perhaps quite hard to grasp.
I don't find it easy to think of good stuff to write about.
I seem to be failing in my intention to be as boring as I possibly can be for self-protection.
It's so great in the theater when everyone catches up on the truth.
All of my scripts are based on other people's novels. Generally, I consider myself as one who writes for theatre. I do not see film work as a continuation of writing for theatre. It is more of an interruption of the writing process.
I'm not interested in clothes; I just like them.
Nobody would be killed on the roads if the speed limit were 10 miles an hour.
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?'
People think I'm very nice, you know. And I'm not as nice as they think.
the bewilderment and incomprehension of critics and audience.
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.