Tom Stoppard Quite Quotations

I just happen to know quite a lot of what happened in Czechoslovakia between 1968 and the fall of Communism.

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.

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.

The whole excitement for writing anything is quite intense. And for a day or two, you think you've done everything extremely well. The problems start on the third day, and continues for the rest of your life.

What a fine persecution - to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

I think I give the impression of being a romantic, and I think inside I'm quite severe. But some might say they had the opposite impression of me.

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.

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?'

'Arcadia' is obviously a play that's got interesting things in it that are perhaps quite hard to grasp.