Quote

I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.

Tom Stoppard

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Tom Stoppard
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: July 3
Dramaturge
Film Director
Journalist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Zlin
Sir Tom Stoppard
Writing
Scene
Long
Quite
Lines
Half
Often
Seduced
Write
Mainly
Stills
Scenes
Still
Six

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I don't write at the library, because I smoke when I work or would like the possibility of a smoke. Also, I need to be at my own desk.
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Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.
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Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last.
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Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.
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He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.
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Chater: You dare to call me that. I demand satisfaction! Septimus: Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you are demanding satisfaction. I cannot spend my time day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family.
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The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.
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When I think of how things could have turned out, I feel as if I've dodged, not just bullets, but 6mm shells.
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It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.
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It's where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it's for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn't matter where on what, it's the light itself, against the darkness, it's what's left of God's purpose when you take away God.
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All mystical experience is coincidence and vice versa, of course.
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I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.
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The causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about, which depend on causes we know absolutely nothing about.
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A circle is the longest distance to same point.
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Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins.
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Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos.
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From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.
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It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.
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I think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn't sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future.
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It seems pointless to be quoted if one isn't going to be quotable ... it's better to be quotable than honest.
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