Tom Stoppard

I think of myself as a theater animal instead of an intellectual animal.

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

Success is a sort of metaphysical experience. I live exactly as I did before - only on a slightly bigger scale. Naturally, I won't be corrupted. I'll sit there in my Rolls, uncorrupted, and tell my chauffeur, uncorruptedly, where to go.

If I wanted to change the world, the last thing I would do is write a play.

The whole excitement for writing anything is quite intense. And for a day or two, you think you've done everything extremely well. The problems start on the third day, and continues for the rest of your life.

The thing about talking about human rights is that when one bears in mind the sharp end of it, one does not want to worry too much about semantics.

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.

Very often in Chekhov, where he exhibits a little bit of human behavior that you recognize as true, you give a little laugh. It's like a reflex.

My life is sectioned off into hot flushes, pursuits of this or that.

Even when the writing seems very frivolous, I'm puritanical. I don't mean my subject matter. It's that I'm almost pathologically incapable of leaving something when I'm not quite happy with it.

I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn't trust my own subjective responses.

Writing a new play shouldn't be seen as a mystery belonging to a priesthood, but as a challenge, a technical challenge, just to get into it.

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.

What is the society we wish to protect? Is it the society of complete surveillance for the commonwealth? Is this the wealth we seek to have in common - optimal security at the cost of maximal surveillance?

Honesty is seldom ingratiating and often discomfiting.

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

You are the plays you write. How on earth could you write them otherwise? They're projections of your own predilections.

Words are sacred. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge the world a little.

A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.

Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.

Rewriting isn't just about dialogue; it's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene.