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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
Better
Wells
Well
Boxes
Thinking
Expect
Life
Dead
Least
Chance
Lying

More quotes by Tom Stoppard

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I will take his secret to the grave, telling people I meet on the way.
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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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I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.
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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.
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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
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Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.
Tom Stoppard
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From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.
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
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There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.
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.
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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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Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light.
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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Having translated two plays by Chekhov, and not speaking Russian myself - I cannot say one sentence. This may shock people... However, I am not shocked, as it is not hard to find out what the words mean.
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 know the British press is very attached to the lobby system. It lets the journalists and the politicians feel proud of their traditional freedoms while giving the reader as much of the truth as they think is good for him.
Tom Stoppard
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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.
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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...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
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If you were handed power on a plate you'd be left fighting over a plate.
Tom Stoppard