Quotes 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.

I'm offended by things and take pathetic little stands against them.

James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.

I flinch when I see my name in the newspapers.

I get the impression sometimes that a play arrives in a sequence of events that I have no control over.

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

As a child, I was airlifted out of the path of the Nazis. Unfortunately, I was parachuted into the path of the Japanese, but then I was airlifted again to India.

I'm very unhappy about my entire life if my writing is going wrong.

The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world.

Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.

In England the rich own the poor and the men own the women.

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-turner. It's very important never, ever, to feel above that.

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

I like the notion of theater as recreational.

I am aware, as everybody has to be, that there's more competition for one's attention nowadays.

The days of the digital watch are numbered.

I'm aware of my old plays and occasionally think about them, but I'm much more anxious about finding the next play.

In Chekhov, everything blends into its opposite, just fractionally, and this is sort of unsettling. And that's why you end up 100 years later asking, 'Is that moment tragic or comic?'

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

The tragedy of journalism is that these are people doing their best work.

Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.

I don't respond well to the Olympic noise, which is the noise of nationalistic triumphalism.

Obviously, you would give your life for your children, or give them the last biscuit on the plate. But to me, the trick in life is to take that sense of generosity between kin, make it apply to the extended family and to your neighbour, your village and beyond.

When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need five days to get the world I've left out of my head and ten days or a fortnight not talking to anyone to hold what I need to hold inside my head.