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I don't keep a diary and I throw away nearly all the paper I might have kept. I don't keep an archive. There's something worrying about my make-up that I try to leave no trace of myself apart from my plays.

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
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More quotes by Tom Stoppard

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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.
Tom Stoppard
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Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything!
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To be frank: the translations that often sound bad in the mouths of the actors, these have often been done by linguists.
Tom Stoppard
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I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking.
Tom Stoppard
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Real data is messy. ...It's all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it's playing your song, but unfortunately it's out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk- I mean, the noise! Impossible!
Tom Stoppard
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I don't really have a system or set of principles. It's kind of common sense mixed up with instinct.
Tom Stoppard
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I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.
Tom Stoppard
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I like pop music. I consider rock 'n' roll to be a branch of pop music.
Tom Stoppard
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The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.
Tom Stoppard
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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.
Tom Stoppard
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Never believe in mirrors or newspapers.
Tom Stoppard
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I really love being in postproduction. First of all, it's all quite self-interested: You can protect things.
Tom Stoppard
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Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway. Guildenstern: What? Rosencrantz: England. Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?
Tom Stoppard
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When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?
Tom Stoppard
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Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos.
Tom Stoppard
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Good things, when short, are twice as good.
Tom Stoppard
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My mind gets into a verbal mode.
Tom Stoppard
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Hell is very likely to be modernization infinitely extended.
Tom Stoppard
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I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has never been in a play. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture.
Tom Stoppard
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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