Tom Stoppard

“I like the notion of theater as recreational.”

“I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.”

“If the audience is made to do not enough work, they resent it without knowing it. Too much and they get lost. There's a perfect pace to be found. And a perfect place that is different for ev...”

“The way 'star' used to be reserved for a small number of people, and when the star category became so vast, they came up with 'superstar,' and then they came up with 'megastar.'”

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

“Rewriting isn't just about dialogue; it's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene.”

“The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.”

“When I was in my teens, I was very, very keen on being the author of a book. What the book was was secondary. I wanted it to be in hardback. I didn't care how thick or thin it was, and I did...”

“I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.”

“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.”

“The thing about talking about human rights is that when one bears in mind the sharp end of it, one does not want to worry too much about semantics.”

“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 th...”

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

“My scripts are possibly too talkative. Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, 'Oh, for God's sake, shut up.'”

“There are many, many more small theater spaces than there were when I was starting out.”

“Nobody would be killed on the roads if the speed limit were 10 miles an hour.”

“The text loses its virginity simply by being staged: it's no longer the abstract ideal version; it's an event.”

“Possibly because I did start off as a journalist, my starting point has always been that you've got to keep an audience with you. Whatever you're doing, you always want a script to be a page...”

“There are certain sorts of jokes which have only to do with the substitution of the unexpected word in a familiar context. If you translated something into French and then had it translated...”

“When you try to grasp the way the Western world is going, you see that we are on a ratchet towards a surveillance state, which is coming to include the whole population in its surveillance....”