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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
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Half
Often
Seduced
Write
Mainly
Stills
Scenes
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Six
More quotes by Tom Stoppard
You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form.
Tom Stoppard
Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat? Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat. Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats. Guildenstern: No, no, no--what you've been is not on boats.
Tom Stoppard
My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
Tom Stoppard
We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.
Tom Stoppard
I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design.
Tom Stoppard
I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.
Tom Stoppard
...Everything has to be taken on trust truth is only that what is taken to be true. It's the currency if living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions. What do you assume?
Tom Stoppard
My scripts are possibly too talkative.
Tom Stoppard
You think human nature is a beast, that it must be put in a cage. But it's the cage that makes the animal bad.
Tom Stoppard
Rewriting isn't just about dialogue, it's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene. All these final decisions are best made when you're there, watching. It's really enjoyable, but you've got to be there at the director's invitation. You can't just barge in and say, I'm the writer.
Tom Stoppard
Act first! The ideas will follow, and if not - well, it's progress
Tom Stoppard
I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking.
Tom Stoppard
The causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about, which depend on causes we know absolutely nothing about.
Tom Stoppard
To be frank: the translations that often sound bad in the mouths of the actors, these have often been done by linguists.
Tom Stoppard
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.
Tom Stoppard
No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.
Tom Stoppard
All mystical experience is coincidence and vice versa, of course.
Tom Stoppard
Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.
Tom Stoppard
It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.
Tom Stoppard
We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.
Tom Stoppard
