Tom Stoppard

“Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.”

“Any revival in which I am involved is liable to change.”

“In the end, my children put me on to Pink Floyd when they were teenagers.”

“After all these years, I definitely associate having a pen in my hand with having an ashtray just out of eye line.”

“As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas. I have no illusions about that.”

“I always loved rock 'n' roll.”

“I'm not like some other writers: I have no actual urgent need or desire to add to what's written. You write it; if you're lucky, it's performed, and that's the end of the whole thing.”

“I have about a dozen cassettes lying about which I use in random order. Very often, I pick up a cassette to dictate a letter, and I find my voice coming back at me with the lines of plays three years old.”

“I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design.”

“There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.”

“The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices—after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's.”

“Philosophy consists in moderating each life so that many lives will fit together with as much liberty and justice as will keep them together: and not so much as will make them fly apart, when the harm will be the greater.”

“I write out of my intellectual experience.”