The trouble is, I can't find a part of myself where you're not important. I write in order to be worth your while and to finance the way I want to live with you. Not the way you want to live. The way I want to live with you. Without you I wouldn't care. I'd eat tinned spaghetti and put on yesterday's clothes. But as it is I change my socks, and make money, and tart up Brodie's unspeakable drivel into speakable drivel so he can be an author too, like me.

"I fairly often find I'm with people who forget I don't quite belong in the world we're in" he says. In 2008 Stoppard was voted the number 76 on the Time 100 Time magazine's list of the most influential people in the world. " He acknowledges that he started off "as a language nerd" primarily enjoying linguistic and ideological playfulness feeling early in his career that journalism was far better suited for presaging political change than playwriting.

Sir Tom Stoppard OM CBE FRSL (born Tomáš Straussler; 3 July 1937) is a Czech-born British playwright knighted in 1997. Themes of human rights censorship and political freedom pervade his work along with exploration of linguistics and philosophy. He co-wrote the screenplays for Brazil and Shakespeare in Love and has received one Academy Award and four Tony Awards.