Quotes from Tom Stoppard

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 every line of the play.

The truth of the matter is that I used to be much more - as it were - shy. Now I don't care!

I think probably I've been influenced by Chekhov and Walt Disney, if you see what I mean.

I don't draw on my inner life in my work.

I write out of my intellectual experience.

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.

'Arcadia' is obviously a play that's got interesting things in it that are perhaps quite hard to grasp.

All of my scripts are based on other people's novels. Generally, I consider myself as one who writes for theatre. I do not see film work as a continuation of writing for theatre. It is more of an interruption of the writing process.

It's very common for people to recommend something to me because they're going on what I've already written, when, what really is the case, is that you want to write about something you haven't written about, in ways that you haven't done before.

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 that is frankly artificial.

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.'

I'm not like some other writers: I have no actual urgent need or desire to add to what's written. You write it; if you're lucky, it's performed, and that's the end of the whole thing.

You should not translate for more than two hours at a time. After that, you lose your edge, the language becomes clumsy, rigid.

From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.

The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say.

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.

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.

It is no light matter to put in jeopardy a single life when it is the very singularity of each life which underpins the idea of a just society.

Time is short, life is short, there's a lot to know. So I skip the entertainers in the newspaper now. I just haven't got time.

I really love being in postproduction. First of all, it's all quite self-interested: You can protect things.

I don't know that I want to share all my most intimate secrets.

A publisher many years ago asked if I'd like to write a novel for £50. And I said, 'Absolutely.'

You don't often get a proposal to do Tolstoy for a really interesting director - that's easy to say yes to.

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 and asked if they wanted us to visit. They said, 'Yes, we'd love that.'