Quotes from Tom Stoppard

Theater in New York is nearer to the street. In London, you have to go deep into the building, usually, to reach the place where theater happens. On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk, and you're lucky if the sound of a police car doesn't rip the envelope twice a night.

The whole thing about writing a play is that it's all about controlling the flow of information traveling from the stage to the audience. It's a stream of information, but you've got your hand on the tap, and you control in which order the audience receives it and with what emphasis, and how you hold it all together.

I don't think falling in love in Slovakia is much different from falling in love in Tunbridge Wells.

I think journalism is important.

If I am on a journey where I only have time to read one-and-a-half books, I never know which one-and-a-half I'll feel like reading. So I bring eight.

Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.

Theater is still a medium which attracts young writers. You'd think that it would be all over by now, with television and film. But it's not.

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.

I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.

If you let the plot be determined by what you feel is in the character's mind at that point, it may not turn out to be a very good play, but at least it will be a play where people are behaving in a kind of truthful way.

Get me inside any boardroom and I'll get any decision I want.

Why should I write a play? I don't have to write a play, do I? But somehow, I think that's what I'm here for, so I'd better do it.

Age is a high price to pay for maturity.

I loved the Beatles when they turned up, and the Stones when they turned up, and never really stopped liking them.

When I think of how things could have turned out, I feel as if I've dodged, not just bullets, but 6mm shells.

The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.

The idea of the state is, or should be, a very limited, prescribed idea. The state looks after the defense of the realm, and other matters - raising revenue to pay for things which are for all of us, and so on. That idea has turned turtle now. The state isn't any longer perceived as an institution which exists to serve us.

Everybody I know is writing plays twice a year. It's sort of making me feel I am not up to much.

If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice.

To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.

One senses that all the Bolsheviks, even those who ended up as cold-blooded autocrats, had been on a journey from idealism to something else, and didn't notice - to mix periods - when the Rubicon was crossed.

I am not somebody who meets a man or a woman somewhere and feels like that is an incredible character that I must write into a play.

You can't go around chasing your own plays and showing up every time somebody does one somewhere. You just cross your fingers and hope that they're OK.