Tom Stoppard

“What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?”

“When I was twelve I was obsessed. Everything was sex. Latin was sex. The dictionary fell open at 'meretrix', a harlot. You could feel the mystery coming off the word like musk. 'Meretrix'! T...”

“The idea that public safety, the safety of the innocent, is an absolute which trumps every other consideration, is tacitly abandoned in the way we live.”

“I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrica...”

“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...”

“A 'human right' is, by definition, timeless. It cannot adhere to some societies and not others, at some times and not at other times.”

“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 -...”

“A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there.”

“I can be affectionate about a lot of things without watching them.”

“People have quite a simple idea about 'Anna Karenina.' They feel that the novel is entirely about a young married woman who falls in love with a cavalry officer and leaves her husband after...”

“All your life, you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.”

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

“The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and inform and even, one might say, elevate, has altered under commercial pressure, perhaps, into...”

“I don't look at my work in a critical or analytical way; I just don't think of myself objectively. It doesn't interest me.”

“In 2005, I got an email from Belarus Free Theatre. They were emailing playwrights in America and England announcing their existence and saying they would like support from us. I wrote back a...”

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

“To be 64 is appalling, so what does it matter being 65?”

“In the period before the arrival of Mrs. Thatcher, politics had been in such low esteem. Everything was so hedged, so mealy-mouthed. Then along came this woman who seemed to have no manners...”

“It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross.”

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