Tom Stoppard

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.'

It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.

The text loses its virginity simply by being staged: it's no longer the abstract ideal version; it's an event.

One of the attractions of translating 'Heroes' is that it's not the kind of play that I write. If it had been, I probably wouldn't have wanted to translate it. There are no one-liners. It's much more a truthful comedy than a play of dazzling wit.

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

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

In the end, one has to feel lucky that things fell out O.K. I've felt that all the years I've been writing plays.

The idea that public safety, the safety of the innocent, is an absolute which trumps every other consideration, is tacitly abandoned in the way we live.

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.

I think I give the impression of being a romantic, and I think inside I'm quite severe. But some might say they had the opposite impression of me.

For me, human rights simply endorse a view of life and a set of moral values that are perfectly clear to an eight-year-old child. A child knows what is fair and isn't fair, and justice derives from that knowledge.

Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.

When I was 20, the idea of having a play on anywhere was just beyond my dreams.

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

I adopted England as least as much as England adopted me.

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation.

I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.

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.

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.

I'm going to be dead before I read the books I'm going to read.

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.