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
The idea that anybody might be allowed to use their common sense when clearly no harm is being done is part of history now.
The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world.
I get the impression sometimes that a play arrives in a sequence of events that I have no control over.
I think I give the impression of being a romantic, and I think inside I'm quite severe. But some might say they had the opposite impression of me.
I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don't feel Czech.
It's wholly deserved and I am completely thrilled. As a writer he has been unswerving for 50 years, ... a most fitting award.
Life is a gamble at terrible odds, if it were a bet, you would not take it
I have two garden parties a year to avoid going out to dinner.
I actually went to an Oasis concert. I thought they were a brilliant songwriting band.
Like almost everything else from the West, the Romantic Revolution arrived late in Russia.
Directors sometimes have good ideas that I wished I'd had, not on rewriting but simply on staging.
Other people's lives come at us without a backstory most of the time. The present is like that.
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
If I see an actor in a role that is really terrifying, no matter how many times I meet him socially, I'm still frightened of him. I think he's going to hit me.