Tom Stoppard Quotes

I write right off the typer. I call it my "machinegun." I hit it hard, usually late at night while drinking wine and listening to classical music on the radio and smoking mangalore ganesh beedies.

Screenplay is the toughest form of writing for me, because you need to be in present tense. You need to be describing things as they occur.

She would smile and show no surprise, convinced as she was, the same as I, that casual meetings are apt to be just the opposite, and that people who make dates are the same kind who need lines on their writing paper, or who always squeeze up from the bottom on a tube of toothpaste.

Study your reader first - your product second. If you understand his reactions, and present those phases of your product that relate to his needs, then you cannot help but write a good letter.

People need space to survive.

All I really need is my bed and my art around me.

Our age has need of violence," he writes. And he is violence.

My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.

I would never go to a studio. I need my space, you know what I mean? I need to be able to chain smoke and pace about, cry and like... spit. Just make noise, make a huge mess. I also feel like if I was concerned for the cost of the studio - like, 'this is costing 40 dollars an hour' - I wouldn't be able to work.

It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.

When I write something, it's usually 'cause I think it's funny or I have a way in, but when I direct something, I really need to be close to it.

Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.

It doesn't need to be imagined, it needs to be written down.

Every writer, big or small, needs to say or write that the genius is always hissed at by his contemporaries. Naturally, this is not true, it happens only occasionally and often by chance. But this need within the writer is enlightening.

I just need some time away to remember why I stay.

It occurred to me that for a long time I tried not to write about my own backyard and my home. I suppose I was selfishly keeping it to my self. And in doing so, I was never able to get out into this incredible wilderness area - by the way, I live right at the edge of the most incredible wilderness area probably in the northern hemisphere.

You just have to decide how close you want them. Not every person in your life needs to be your best friend: some can be friends or just friendly acquaintances.

I definitely isolate, but I also always have people in front of me, and I have to be OK with that. I'm in a business where, on the set, you're around two hundred people every day, and if you're high on the call sheet, you sort of set the tone for the set. And you want people to feel appreciated, and you want to ask them how their kids are. You want to talk to people and invest in them and let them know that they're appreciated and heard. But then I do like to just kind of withdraw.

I must confess that when I'm alone in my study, here in New York, writing; that's when I'm happy.

To be a writer you need to see things as they are, and to see things as they are you need a certain basic innocence.

I love working with my dad, but I need to be independent and do my own stuff.

I have just been refining the room in which I sit, yet I sometimes doubt that a writer should refine or improve his workroom by so much as a dictionary: one thing leads to another and the first thing you know he has a stuffed chair and is fast asleep in it.

Call me a schoolmarm, but few things make me angrier than people not taking good care of library materials.

It takes isolation and solitude for me to write.