I found this interview with Sir Stoppard timed to the release of a Blu-Ray disc of Rosencratz & Guilderstern Are Dead. The scope of the interview goes well beyond that topic.
As you go through life, does writing get easier, harder?
For me it has to do with energy. So in a rather banal sense it gets harder, it takes me longer to produce a given amount of work.
And, of course, there is the sense, the general rule with artists turns out to be that from the long perspective of hindsight, you liked their early work.
That is a small joke that passes between writers, especially between writers when they are friendly and prove their friendship by insulting each other.
They tell each other, I loved your early work. And there are very few great artists who have done major work once they approach 70 or 80. When I think of my favorite writers, it was the way they started off that captured me and left me captive.
I’m not an opera person at all, but I think of Verdi, for example, as someone who was writing at the age of 80 work comparable to what he was doing 50 years earlier.
I’d like that to be true of me, and in about 18 months I will be 80, so I’ll have to set about trying to prove it. I don’t know that I can.
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