Author

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.

From Tom Stoppard

My family was in Singapore when the Japanese War started. We were in Singapore at the time of Pearl Harbor, and by the beginning of 1942, the Japanese invasion of Burma and Singapore had started.

From 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.

From Tom Stoppard

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 back into English by somebody who didn't know the original, you'd lose what was funny.

From Tom Stoppard

I just happen to know quite a lot of what happened in Czechoslovakia between 1968 and the fall of Communism.

From Tom Stoppard

My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.

From Tom Stoppard

The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It's essentially self-interested on the part of authority.

From Tom Stoppard

If enough things that are untrue are said about you, no one will know what really is true.

From Tom Stoppard

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

From Tom Stoppard

I was so thrilled being a reporter, because it gave you the kind of access to people that you wouldn't ever get to meet.

From Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard

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