Tom Stoppard

“Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the playwright got there before we got there.”

“I like dialogue that is slightly more brittle than life. I have always admired and wished to write one of those 1940s film scripts where every line is written with a sharpness and economy that is frankly artificial.”

“What freedom means, is being allowed to sing in my bath as loudly as will not interfere with my neighbour's freedom to sing a different tune in his.”

“Writing a new play shouldn't be seen as a mystery belonging to a priesthood, but as a challenge, a technical challenge, just to get into it.”

“I'm not that taken with Freudian perspectives. They seem to be overcomplicated.”

“Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life.”

“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 don't do interviews under false pretenses.”

“The idea of the state is, or should be, a very limited, prescribed idea. The state looks after the defense of the realm, and other matters - raising revenue to pay for things which are for all of us, and so on. That idea has turned turtle now. The state isn't any longer perceived as an institution which exists to serve us.”

“Theater is still a medium which attracts young writers. You'd think that it would be all over by now, with television and film. But it's not.”

“I'm not interested in clothes; I just like them.”

“If I wanted to change the world, the last thing I would do is write a play.”

“I don't want to come over as some boringly self-deprecating person. But I don't see myself as a groundbreaking writer in the way plays are structured.”

“Schelling's God is the totality of Nature struggling towards consciousness, and Man is as far as the struggle has got, with the animals not too far behind, vegetables somewhat lagging, and rocks nowhere as yet. Do we believe this? Does it matter? Think of it as a poem or a painting. Art doesn't have to be true like a theorem. It can be true in other ways. This truth says there is a meaning to it all, and Man is where the meaning begins to show.”

“Directors sometimes have good ideas that I wished I'd had, not on rewriting but simply on staging.”

“It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.”

“It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.”

“I proudly tell people, 'I have no computer,' so as not to be ashamed of having no computer.”

“I think I enlist comedy to a serious purpose.”

“I've got no interest in educating or instructing people.”