Tom Stoppard

“The notion that the 'leader' has the right to ask huge sacrifices of your generation for a notional future paradise - if you'd be good enough to lie down under the wheels of the juggernaut - that sentimental and self-aggrandising rationalisation for brute force and cowardice I felt from adolescence was wrong.”

“The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world.”

“I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.”

“I never had any frustration about writing uncredited. I always felt that the satisfaction of doing it was in the doing of it, really, and getting recognised by the small number of people that know what you did.”

“When you write, it's making a certain kind of music in your head. There's a rhythm to it, a pulse, and on the whole, I'm writing to that drum rather than the psychological process.”

“Personally, I read reviews because I'm interested by them, but they don't have utility for me.”

“I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn't one's lover.”

“Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.”

“The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.”

“I feel overestimated.”

“If I hadn't left Czechoslovakia, I would have been dead.”

“The truth of the matter is that I used to be much more - as it were - shy. Now I don't care!”

“If I am on a journey where I only have time to read one-and-a-half books, I never know which one-and-a-half I'll feel like reading. So I bring eight.”

“I think of myself as a theater animal instead of an intellectual animal.”

“I don't believe that we evolved moral psychology; it just doesn't seem plausible to me as a biological phenomenon.”

“The trouble is, I can't find a part of myself where you're not important. I write in order to be worth your while and to finance the way I want to live with you. Not the way you want to live. The way I want to live with you. Without you I wouldn't care. I'd eat tinned spaghetti and put on yesterday's clothes. But as it is I change my socks, and make money, and tart up Brodie's unspeakable drivel into speakable drivel so he can be an author too, like me.”

“I am aware, as everybody has to be, that there's more competition for one's attention nowadays.”

“The whole excitement for writing anything is quite intense. And for a day or two, you think you've done everything extremely well. The problems start on the third day, and continues for the rest of your life.”

“The thing that happens remarkably often is that the people who are writing a dissertation believe they need to speak to me in order to do their dissertation. They need to interview me.”

“I like trying to create a spark through a collaboration between me and the audience.”