Quotes from Tom Stoppard

I've never really worked out this thought, and I don't know if I'm really conscious of it, but I can see there's an attraction about writing about a period that's over and isn't going to change colour while you look at it.

I barely remembered my father; I'm confused between genuine memory and the few photographs that survived.

The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.

Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.

If you were handed power on a plate you'd be left fighting over a plate.

Give us this day our daily mask.

One doesn't want one's democracy to behave like a dictatorial or fascistic police. One doesn't.

I like pop music. I consider rock 'n' roll to be a branch of pop music.

The possibilities are infinite with new writing; every time you open a new script, there's no limit to what it might contain.

My intention still is to write a play to commemorate, possibly rather skeptically, the 50th anniversary of the Russian revolution. I started it at the beginning of 1966, but confronted with the enormous importance and reality of that revolution, I absolutely boggle. I don't know what to do about it.

I seem to be failing in my intention to be as boring as I possibly can be for self-protection.

I think I'm a difficult conventional writer.

I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking.

I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don't feel Czech.

If I hadn't left Czechoslovakia, I would have been dead.

I'm not that taken with Freudian perspectives. They seem to be overcomplicated.

It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing.

If you are well known at something else, you get points for doing stuff which lots of other people do, and much more, and they don't get any points at all. You get over-praised, over-credited.

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

I don't think Stoppardian has a precise definition.

Other people's lives come at us without a backstory most of the time. The present is like that.

A free press needs to be a respected press.

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

I don't do interviews under false pretenses.