Tom Stoppard Quotes

As a playwright, you are a torturer of actors and of the audience as well. You inflict things on people.

It's hard to find a play that's right for me to do. Rather than waiting around for the right script to come along, I decided to write one myself.

I thought I wanted to be a playwright because I was interested in stories and telling stories.

I love novels, but I'm not a novelist. I'm just a dramatist, which means I write lines for actors. That's all I have ever wanted to do.

My first play was 'The Room', written when I was twenty-seven.

I am trying to write a play that is big and I feel represents me - that's my big ambition.

If I ever wrote a script myself, it would be strongly emotional material.

It's an odd mix, the life of a playwright.

I grew up wanting to be a writer for theatre.

Before acting, I was always attracted to words, to literature - be they the words of Williams, Arthur Miller, Shakespeare or Moliere.

The ideas of the great playwrights are almost always larger than the experiences of even the best actors.

In my free time, I'd written 'Sammy's Hill' - it had started out as a play. I just did it for myself.

It's hard to write a good play because it's hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience.

For me, a play is a form of writing which isn't complete until it is interpreted by actors. But it's still a form of writing. And so most of my time is spent thinking about how to write a sentence.

You write a play mostly out of yourself. There's a need to get a certain thing down.

A storyteller is basically what actors and writers are.

I've only ever taken a playwriting class, but I like creative writing and writing screenplays.

The instinct to impersonate produces the actor; the desire to provide pleasure by impersonations produces the playwright; the desire to provide this pleasure with adequate characterization and dialogue memorable in itself produces dramatic literature.

I write plays instinctively. I don't like writing movie scripts.

It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.

Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of your life.

I find playwriting to be incredibly difficult compared to screenwriting. Part of it is that I grew up watching movies and not watching plays.

I had some experience writing collaboratively when I wrote for the theatre.

Plays were really my last option. The reason I didn't write plays initially was because I thought theatre was the worst of all the art forms.

The person whose work introduced me to the craft was Lorraine Hansberry. The person who taught me to love the craft was Tennessee Williams. The person who really taught me the power of the craft was August Wilson, and the person who taught me the political heft of the craft was Arthur Miller.