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 think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn't sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future.
I should have the courage of my lack of convictions.
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
Words, words. They're all we have to go on.
I didn't feel good about cutting out parts of very famous speeches, ... You think you somehow need all of it or you get none of it, but that's not true.
...and for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute...
Of all forms of fiction, autobiography is the most gratuitous.
I take every possible side.
I feel overestimated.
People think there's a choice between smoking and immortality, but we've all got to die of something.
Suicide is no more than a trick played on the calendar.
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.
All mystical experience is coincidence; and vice versa, of course.
Give us this day our daily mask.