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 don't believe there is something called 'film' and something called 'theater,' and that words belong in the theater. Some rather bad films have few words in them; some good films have a lot of words in them.
As a child, I was airlifted out of the path of the Nazis. Unfortunately, I was parachuted into the path of the Japanese, but then I was airlifted again to India.
When 'The Dark Side of the Moon' was a new album in 1973, a friend of mine walked into my room where I was working with a copy in his hand and said, 'You really have to do a play about this album.'
Even when the writing seems very frivolous, I'm puritanical. I don't mean my subject matter. It's that I'm almost pathologically incapable of leaving something when I'm not quite happy with it.
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 am not a mathematician, but I was aware that for centuries, mathematics was considered the queen of the sciences because it claimed certainty. It was grounded on some fundamental certainties - axioms - that led to others.
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.
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.