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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
Keep
Nearly
Might
Apart
Archive
Play
Throw
Archives
Trying
Kept
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Something
Paper
Diaries
Make
Leave
Trace
Worry
Worrying
Away
Plays

More quotes by Tom Stoppard

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Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.
Tom Stoppard
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Sometimes directors feel a script needs something, but they're not sure what it is, so they show it to a friend if the friend is a writer, he ends up kicking around with that script for a while.
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I've seldom minded other people's opinions, but the other side of that coin is that I've seldom been interested by them, um their opinions about me I mean.
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Wars are fought for oil wells and coaling stations for control of the Dardanelles or the Suez Canal for colonial pickings to buy cheap in and conquered markets to sell dear in. War is capitalism with the gloves off.
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If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.
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I burn with no causes.
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Give us this day our daily mask.
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It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.
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Writing a play is like smashing that [glass] ashtray, filming it in slow motion, and then running the film in reverse, so that the fragments of rubble appear to fly together. You start - or at least I start - with the rubble.
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I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.
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There is no one so radical as a man-servant whose freedom of the champagne bin has been interfered with.
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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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It would have been nice to have had unicorns.
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The results of the divorce between truth and human beings can be most graphically observed in politics.
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Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.
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Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.
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Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway. Guildenstern: What? Rosencrantz: England. Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?
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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.
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Words are sacred. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge the world a little.
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All mystical experience is coincidence and vice versa, of course.
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