Quote

I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.

Tom Stoppard

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Tom Stoppard
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: July 3
Dramaturge
Film Director
Journalist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Zlin
Sir Tom Stoppard
Disown
Statements
Fiction
Making
Write
Writing
Way

More quotes by Tom Stoppard

Image
There is no one so radical as a man-servant whose freedom of the champagne bin has been interfered with.
Tom Stoppard
Image
I really love being in postproduction. First of all, it's all quite self-interested: You can protect things.
Tom Stoppard
Image
No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.
Tom Stoppard
Image
I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.
Tom Stoppard
Image
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
Image
Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos.
Tom Stoppard
Image
...reality, the name we give to the common experience.
Tom Stoppard
Image
It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.
Tom Stoppard
Image
He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.
Tom Stoppard
Image
We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.
Tom Stoppard
Image
To be frank: the translations that often sound bad in the mouths of the actors, these have often been done by linguists.
Tom Stoppard
Image
There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.
Tom Stoppard
Image
Having translated two plays by Chekhov, and not speaking Russian myself - I cannot say one sentence. This may shock people... However, I am not shocked, as it is not hard to find out what the words mean.
Tom Stoppard
Image
The causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about, which depend on causes we know absolutely nothing about.
Tom Stoppard
Image
It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.
Tom Stoppard
Image
We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.
Tom Stoppard
Image
Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway. Guildenstern: What? Rosencrantz: England. Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?
Tom Stoppard
Image
Rewriting isn't just about dialogue, it's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene. All these final decisions are best made when you're there, watching. It's really enjoyable, but you've got to be there at the director's invitation. You can't just barge in and say, I'm the writer.
Tom Stoppard
Image
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
Image
Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!
Tom Stoppard