Tom Stoppard Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

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

  Tom Stoppard

  Writing, Fiction, Way

  Tom Stoppard, Paul Delaney (1994). “Tom Stoppard in Conversation”, p.49, University of Michigan Press

• I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.

  Tom Stoppard

  Inspirational, Believe, Writing

  Tom Stoppard, Paul Delaney (1994). “Tom Stoppard in Conversation”, p.196, University of Michigan Press

• I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.

  Tom Stoppard

  Writing, One Love, Social

  Tom Stoppard (1984). “Tom Stoppard, Professional foul: notes”

• I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.

  Tom Stoppard

  Writing, Play, Way

  Tom Stoppard, Paul Delaney (1994). “Tom Stoppard in Conversation”, p.49, University of Michigan Press

• I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.

  Tom Stoppard

  Children, Writing, Thinking

  Tom Stoppard (1999). “Arcadia”

• Save the gerund and screw the whale.

  Tom Stoppard

  Writing, Editing, Whales

  Tom Stoppard (2014). “The Real Thing”, p.12, Faber & Faber

• Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum.

  Tom Stoppard

  Writing, Vacuums, Flow

• The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

  Tom Stoppard

  Writing, Mean, Tragedy

  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967) act 2. Cf. Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1979) 573:3

• 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

  Writing, Long, Half

• 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

  Coffee, Writing, Clouds

  Tom Stoppard (2013). “Arcadia”, p.62, Faber & Faber

• Good things, when short, are twice as good.

  Tom Stoppard

  Writing, Editing, Good Things

• He's never known anything like it! But then, he has never known anything to write home about, so this is nothing to write home about.

  Tom Stoppard

  Home, Writing, Known

  "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead". www.imdb.com. September 10, 1990.

• The trouble is, I can't find a part of myself where you're not important. I write in order to be worth your while and to finance the way I want to live with you. Not the way you want to live. The way I want to live with you. Without you I wouldn't care. I'd eat tinned spaghetti and put on yesterday's clothes. But as it is I change my socks, and make money, and tart up Brodie's unspeakable drivel into speakable drivel so he can be an author too, like me.

  Tom Stoppard

  Life, Writing, Clothes

  "The Real Thing". Book by Tom Stoppard, November 16, 1982.

• I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.

  Tom Stoppard

  Writing, Play, Way

  Tom Stoppard, Paul Delaney (1994). “Tom Stoppard in Conversation”, p.31, University of Michigan Press

• I never had any frustration about writing uncredited. I always felt that the satisfaction of doing it was in the doing of it, really, and getting recognised by the small number of people that know what you did.

  Tom Stoppard

  Writing, Frustration, Small Numbers

• 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

  Writing, Artist, Oxygen

  "'You can't help being what you write'". Interview with Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. September 5, 2008.

• Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don't like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical to ours.

  Tom Stoppard

  Writing, Ideas, Two

  Tom Stoppard (2014). “The Invention of Love”, p.27, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

• I don't write at the library, because I smoke when I work or would like the possibility of a smoke. Also, I need to be at my own desk.

  Tom Stoppard

  Writing, Library, Needs

  Source: www.timeout.com

• Writing a play is like smashing that [glass] ashtray, filming it in slow motion, and then running the film in reverse, so that the fragments of rubble appear to fly together. You start - or at least I start - with the rubble.

  Tom Stoppard

  Running, Writing, Glasses

• 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

  Writing, Thinking, Play

• If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.

  Tom Stoppard

  Clever, Future, Writing

  "Arcadia". Play by Tom Stoppard, 1993.

• I began writing for theater, and maybe because of that I've always thought of myself as a theater writer who does work in film sometimes.

  Tom Stoppard

  Writing, Doe, Sometimes

  Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

• I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking.

  Tom Stoppard

  Writing, Play, Cooking

• I enjoy writing dialogue; it comes naturally to me.

  Tom Stoppard

  Writing, Enjoy, Dialogue

  Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

• It's probably unprecedented for a filmmaker simply to take the writers' script and treat it as the instructions on the package. What really happens is you pretty much suppress your own instincts - and your own views on the matter - and write things the way filmmakers would like to have them, though the filmmakers often don't know what they want. They can only find out by reading what you do.

  Tom Stoppard

  Reading, Writing, Views

  Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

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