Tom Stoppard Quote
Guil: …The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices— after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people’s. Player: Uncertainty is the normal state. You’re nobody special. [He makes to leave again. Guil loses his cool.] Guil: But for God’s sake what are we supposed to do?!Player: Relax. Respond. That’s what people do. You can’t go through life questioning your situation at every turn.Guil: But we don’t know what’s going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don’t know how to act. Player: Act natural. You know why you’re here at least. Guil: We only know what we’re told, and that’s little enough. And for all we know it isn’t even true. Player: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. it’s the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn’t make any difference so long as it is honored.
Guil: …The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices— after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people’s. Player: Uncertainty is the normal state. You’re nobody special. [He makes to leave again. Guil loses his cool.] Guil: But for God’s sake what are we supposed to do?!Player: Relax. Respond. That’s what people do. You can’t go through life questioning your situation at every turn.Guil: But we don’t know what’s going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don’t know how to act. Player: Act natural. You know why you’re here at least. Guil: We only know what we’re told, and that’s little enough. And for all we know it isn’t even true. Player: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. it’s the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn’t make any difference so long as it is honored.
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About Tom Stoppard
Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946, having spent the previous three years (1943–1946) in a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright.
Stoppard's most prominent plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), Night and Day (1978), The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993), The Invention of Love (1997), The Coast of Utopia (2002), Rock 'n' Roll (2006) and Leopoldstadt (2020). He wrote the screenplays for Brazil (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), The Russia House (1990), Billy Bathgate (1991), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Enigma (2001), and Anna Karenina (2012), as well as the HBO limited series Parade's End (2013). He directed the film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), an adaptation of his own 1966 play, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as the leads.
He has received numerous awards and honours including an Academy Award, a Laurence Olivier Award, and five Tony Awards. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 11 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". It was announced in June 2019 that Stoppard had written a new play, Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish community of early 20th-century Vienna. The play premiered in January 2020 at Wyndham's Theatre. The play went on to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and later the 2022 Tony Award for Best Play.