Tom Stoppard Quotes

While writing 'The Orientalist,' I played a soundtrack that alternated between ragtime and Azeri mugams, Russian operas and German and Italian pop songs from the 1920s and 30s. When I finally finished, I gorged on all my music from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.

The past is another planet.

The artist secretes nostalgia around life.

Beginning writers are often advised to 'write what you know,' and since I knew about quilters - their quirks, their inside jokes, their disputes and their generosity, their quarrels and their kindnesses - the lives of quilters became a natural subject for me. Quilting wove together my two themes as completely and effortlessly as I could have hoped.

I have a huge music library and deliberately choose the piece of music to match the piece I'm writing. So, every book I write has its own "soundtrack."

I'm interested in taking a form, breaking it apart, and then rebuilding it. It is about transformation for me...it is a very core notion that stabilizes my practice.

A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.

The conscious mind is the editor, and the subconscious mind is the writer. And the joy of writing, when you're writing from your subconscious, is beautiful - it's thrilling. When you're editing, which is your conscious mind, it's like torture.

I am not a historian. I am a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past

A picture is not thought out and settled beforehand. While it is being done it changes as one's thoughts change.

If i write a book it will probably be a book about how not to use the internet or a book of poetry.

Because there is something difficult and destructive involved, there must be something creative involved as well. Relating to that creative aspect is the point.

You can't make sense of the present unless a part of you lives in the past.

I thought my song was beginning that day, but it was almost done.

The characters that I create are parts of myself and I send them on little missions to find out what I don’t know yet.

When you're writing about something that happened, it helps you transition to the present. Ironically enough, by focusing on your presidency, it helps you realize that you're no longer the president. By reliving moments, it helps you stay focused on the moment.

The only way to get anything out of a writer's brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.

When you're not writing, you're not doing anything else either because everything you do goes into the writing.

Writing, even though it's hard work, is really a joy when you get these characters to come alive. It's hard to trace where they come from. I can't say that I am sitting here one night at nine o'clock and that a character occurs to me. The magic for me happens at the typewriter.

Fashion keeps me designing: the love of change, the idea that the next one will be the right one, the nonstop dialogue

Agitation gives birth to creation.

I think I'll try to keep working in film for a little bit. There's something still kind of magical about it, that I don't want to let go of.

Sometimes I think I live more closely to the past than the present.

History after all is the true poetry.