Tom Stoppard Quotes

I feel that when I began writing, I had a need to know more about the play before I got into it. I think that's the way I was thinking. But my actual experience is that the best way to find out what the structure is, is by writing the play out laterally. You just have got to be brave enough to start without knowing where you are going.

~ Tom Stoppard

I write out of my intellectual experience.

~ Tom Stoppard

In January 1962, when I was the author of one and a half unperformed plays, I attended a student production of 'The Birthday Party' at the Victoria Rooms in Bristol. Just before it began, I realised that Harold Pinter was sitting in front of me.

~ Tom Stoppard

I'm a playwright who gets involved in movies when I'm not writing a play.

~ Tom Stoppard

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

~ Tom Stoppard

I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn't trust my own subjective responses.

~ Tom Stoppard

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.

~ Tom Stoppard

Every exit is an entry somewhere else.

~ Tom Stoppard

I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something that - even if it can't be quantitatively measured as other subjects - it's as fundamental to all education.

~ Tom Stoppard

Theater in New York is nearer to the street. In London, you have to go deep into the building, usually, to reach the place where theater happens. On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk, and you're lucky if the sound of a police car doesn't rip the envelope twice a night.

~ Tom Stoppard

Like almost everything else from the West, the Romantic Revolution arrived late in Russia.

~ Tom Stoppard

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.

~ Tom Stoppard

When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all.

~ Tom Stoppard

Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very modern anger against anti-Semitism.

~ Tom Stoppard

I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.

~ Tom Stoppard

What is the society we wish to protect? Is it the society of complete surveillance for the commonwealth? Is this the wealth we seek to have in common - optimal security at the cost of maximal surveillance?

~ Tom Stoppard

That I have the right to express myself freely at all times in all circumstances entails the idea that free speech is a 'basic human right' possessed by each individual, and, as such, trumps the interests of the society or group, including my neighbour.

~ Tom Stoppard