Quote

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

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
Mean
However
Translated
People
Words
Shocked
Two
Russian
Cannot
Sentence
May
Shock
Find
Plays
Play
Sentences
Hard
Speaking
Chekhov

More quotes by Tom Stoppard

Image
I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Endlessly.
Tom Stoppard
Image
It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.
Tom Stoppard
Image
The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.
Tom Stoppard
Image
If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.
Tom Stoppard
Image
Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight. Equilibrium is pragmatic. You have to get everything into proportion. You compensate, rebalance yourself so that you maintain your angle to your world. When the world shifts, you shift.
Tom Stoppard
Image
For a long time I managed to think two things simultaneously, that I am actually a good playwright, and that the next time I write a play I will be revealed as someone who is no good at all.
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
My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.
Tom Stoppard
Image
I don't really have a system or set of principles. It's kind of common sense mixed up with instinct.
Tom Stoppard
Image
Hell is very likely to be modernization infinitely extended.
Tom Stoppard
Image
Personally I am in favour of education but a university is not the place for it.
Tom Stoppard
Image
Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!
Tom Stoppard
Image
It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross.
Tom Stoppard
Image
My scripts are possibly too talkative.
Tom Stoppard
Image
...Everything has to be taken on trust truth is only that what is taken to be true. It's the currency if living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions. What do you assume?
Tom Stoppard
Image
Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead.
Tom Stoppard
Image
Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.
Tom Stoppard
Image
It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.
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
Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last.
Tom Stoppard