Tom Stoppard Quotes

It's hard for me to just practice without writing something.

There's a part of me that feels like it gets really frustrating to keep working in the manner that I made the book 'Shortcomings,' where everything is pretty accurate to the real world.

I've written a lot of really good books. Now we'll see if I can write any more good books. I mean there's a chance I won't, but I'm going to try.

Now you mustn't think that I don't have any ideas for novels in my head. I've got ideas for ten novels in my head. But with every idea I have, I already foresee the wrong novels I would write, because I also have critical ideas in my head; I've got a full theory of the perfect novel, and that's what stumps me.

That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.

You're always looking for good scripts and when they're not always forthcoming you go mad.

I feel the symbolic world is the nub of a problem for an artist.

I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.

I love all genres. The only thing I get stymied by is the Family Drama. I don't necessarily know how to approach that.

I kept trying to write these books that were sort of outside of my realm, and I kept failing.

Because the more you write the more you're aware of the weight of your tradition and the difficulties of the form and the more you have already done that you do not want to do again.

Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: 'After a heavy rainfall, poems titled 'Rain' pour in from across the nation.'

Anyone who says it's so easy to write a country hit and that it's just a formula - well, try it sometime. If it was that easy, everybody would be doing it.

I gave up writing children's books. I wanted to escape from them as I had once wanted to escape from 'Punch': as I have always wanted to escape. In vain.

Sometimes, so much of the difficulty is the question of 'What am I going to write about?' because the world is so vast.

When I look at green trees on a sunny day, I don't know how to make an interesting picture of that.

Sometimes, trying to make a work of art can be very difficult and very painful.

I think what happens is that some writers, who are so great in television or whatever, once they become successful, they get out of the loop of real life. It's real hard to draw on something to write.

I had written or cowritten eight of the ten songs on 'Beauty and the Beat,' and I had written our biggest hit, 'We Got the Beat.' How was I going to top all of that?

It took me a while to get back to 'The Queen of the Night.' I was angry with it as an idea because I felt like it had sort of ruined my life by taking so much attention away from 'Edinburgh.' So it essentially languished in a drawer until 2004, when I pulled it out, dusted it off, and thought, 'Oh, I actually really like this idea.'

If I had to write a novel, I'd start crying after three lines.

I find composition difficult. I never thought of myself as someone who can crank it out. I can't crank it out - I have to dig it out the hard way. In some sense, you become more confident in your technical apparatus, but it becomes harder to do something you haven't done already.

As a writer, a blank page will humble the hell out of you. It always does, and it always will.

It's so hard to do the right thing with a pen and a piece of paper and a set of abstract thoughts.

I think being creative is incredibly difficult and painful.