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. – Tom Stoppard
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. – Tom Stoppard
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. – Tom Stoppard
I write scenes – often quite long scenes – mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do. – Tom Stoppard
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn’t believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don’t have an alternative theory. – Tom Stoppard
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. – Tom Stoppard
I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead. – Tom Stoppard
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. – Tom Stoppard
I actually went to an Oasis concert. I thought they were a brilliant songwriting band. – Tom Stoppard
When I think of how things could have turned out, I feel as if I’ve dodged, not just bullets, but 6mm shells. – Tom Stoppard
When I was 20, in 1957, and maybe you would say I was old enough to know better, but nevertheless, I was completely nuts about Buddy Holly. And I loved pop bands that had absolutely no intellectual pretensions whatsoever. I loved the Monkees. – Tom Stoppard
As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas. I have no illusions about that. – Tom Stoppard
A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors. – Tom Stoppard
You don’t often get a proposal to do Tolstoy for a really interesting director – that’s easy to say yes to. – Tom Stoppard
People have quite a simple idea about ‘Anna Karenina.’ They feel that the novel is entirely about a young married woman who falls in love with a cavalry officer and leaves her husband after much agony, and pays the price for that. – Tom Stoppard
When you try to grasp the way the Western world is going, you see that we are on a ratchet towards a surveillance state, which is coming to include the whole population in its surveillance. This is our reward for accepting the restraints on the way we live now. – Tom Stoppard
It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it’s a painting, and if you can walk around it it’s a sculpture. – Tom Stoppard
When you write, it’s making a certain kind of music in your head. There’s a rhythm to it, a pulse, and on the whole, I’m writing to that drum rather than the psychological process. – Tom Stoppard
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art. – Tom Stoppard
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. – Tom Stoppard
A publisher many years ago asked if I’d like to write a novel for รด?50. And I said, ‘Absolutely.’ – Tom Stoppard
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. – Tom Stoppard