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
I am good at being shown something and counterpunching.
With his earliest work he stood alone in British theatre up against the bewilderment and incomprehension of critics, the audience and writers too.
Very often in Chekhov, where he exhibits a little bit of human behavior that you recognize as true, you give a little laugh. It's like a reflex.
You end up going to school plays quite a bit as a parent, there are a lot of kids who are doing the job as well as they can, but there's always one or two who seem much more at home in the world of impersonation.
You are the plays you write. How on earth could you write them otherwise? They're projections of your own predilections.
Everybody I know is writing plays twice a year. It's sort of making me feel I am not up to much.
What Tolstoy is on about is that carnal love is not a good idea.
When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all.
Nobody would be killed on the roads if the speed limit were 10 miles an hour.
My life is sectioned off into hot flushes, pursuits of this or that.
There are too many things I find it difficult to say 'no' to.
Like almost everything else from the West, the Romantic Revolution arrived late in Russia.
Life is a gamble at terrible odds, if it were a bet, you would not take it
Lou Reed was a hero because he was an anti-hero.