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Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead.

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
Well
Boxes
Thinking
Expect
Life
Dead
Least
Chance
Lying
Better
Wells

More quotes by Tom Stoppard

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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.
Tom Stoppard
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Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.
Tom Stoppard
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Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn't death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees but it doesn't bring death home to anyone- it doesn't catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says- 'One day you are going to die.
Tom Stoppard
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The tragedy of journalism is that these are people doing their best work.
Tom Stoppard
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Good things, when short, are twice as good.
Tom Stoppard
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Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!
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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To say that it is without pace, point, focus, interest, drama, wit or originality is to say simply that it does not happen to be my cup of tea.
Tom Stoppard
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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
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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.
Tom Stoppard
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No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.
Tom Stoppard
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In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness.
Tom Stoppard
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I burn with no causes.
Tom Stoppard
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A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.
Tom Stoppard
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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.
Tom Stoppard
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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.
Tom Stoppard
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Each move is dictated by the previous one--that is the meaning of order
Tom Stoppard
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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
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If rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!
Tom Stoppard
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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.
Tom Stoppard