Tom Stoppard Good Quotations

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.

I don't believe there is something called 'film' and something called 'theater,' and that words belong in the theater. Some rather bad films have few words in them; some good films have a lot of words in them.

If you let the plot be determined by what you feel is in the character's mind at that point, it may not turn out to be a very good play, but at least it will be a play where people are behaving in a kind of truthful way.

I don't find it easy to think of good stuff to write about.

I am good at being shown something and counterpunching.

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.

What Tolstoy is on about is that carnal love is not a good idea.

Directors sometimes have good ideas that I wished I'd had, not on rewriting but simply on staging.

Quite early on, and certainly since I started writing, I found that philosophical questions occupied me more than any other kind. I hadn't really thought of them as being philosophical questions, but one rapidly comes to an understanding that philosophy's only really about two questions: 'What is true?' and 'What is good?'

Somebody who likes to do my plays is a good director for them.