Love is – OK, it’s 20 things, but it isn’t 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
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.
If the audience is made to do not enough work, they resent it without knowing it. Too much and they get lost. There’s a perfect pace to be found. And a perfect place that is different for every line of the play.
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.
You end up going to school plays quite a bit as a parent, there are a lot of kids who are doing the job as well as they can, but there’s always one or two who seem much more at home in the world of impersonation.
Eternity’s a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it all going to end?
The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.
I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn’t wait to be out of education.
Back in the East you can’t do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.
There are too many things I find it difficult to say ‘no’ to.
Despite the digital age, there is a very large number of venues and spaces that are looking for plays, and many of them are looking for new plays.
I have two garden parties a year to avoid going out to dinner.
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.
I take every possible side.
We’re actors. We’re the opposite of people.
After all these years, I definitely associate having a pen in my hand with having an ashtray just out of eye line.
If you are well known at something else, you get points for doing stuff which lots of other people do, and much more, and they don’t get any points at all. You get over-praised, over-credited.
I can’t remember what my first script was.
I don’t think Stoppardian has a precise definition.
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn’t; translations seem to be of their time.
I think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn’t sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future.
Every exit is an entry somewhere else.
My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
It’s not the voting that’s democracy; it’s the counting.
I really just like to be at a desk.
I’m a very boring person.
I’m a conservative kind of person. I don’t think rightwing is quite the same thing. But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament.
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.
The more doors there are for you to open, the better the play.
One of the nice things about the world of filmmaking is that you make friends in the business. Sometimes directors feel a script needs something, but they’re not sure what it is, so they show it to a friend; if the friend is a writer, he ends up kicking around with that script for a while.
James Joyce – an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.
The notion that the ‘leader’ has the right to ask huge sacrifices of your generation for a notional future paradise – if you’d be good enough to lie down under the wheels of the juggernaut – that sentimental and self-aggrandising rationalisation for brute force and cowardice I felt from adolescence was wrong.
When Auden said his poetry didn’t save one Jew from the gas chamber, he’d said it all.
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.’
In 2005, I got an email from Belarus Free Theatre. They were emailing playwrights in America and England announcing their existence and saying they would like support from us. I wrote back and asked if they wanted us to visit. They said, ‘Yes, we’d love that.’
Like many people, I only knew of Ford Madox Ford through a book called ‘The Good Soldier,’ which is everybody’s favorite Ford Madox Ford if they have one, but I came to read ‘Parade’s End’ when it was suggested via Damien Timmer of Mammoth Screen.
My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
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’m a playwright who gets involved in movies when I’m not writing a play.
In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness.
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.
The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It’s essentially self-interested on the part of authority.
If enough things that are untrue are said about you, no one will know what really is true.
Rewriting isn’t just about dialogue; it’s the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene.
To wrap up the idea of ‘Parade’s End’ in a sentence or two, I would say it’s a love story in which we see a man with two women, and we know what’s attractive about them. And we know why and what they feel about him.
Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.
