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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
Lying
Better
Wells
Well
Boxes
Thinking
Expect
Life
Dead
Least
Chance
More quotes by Tom Stoppard
If you took away everything in the world that had to be invented, there'd be nothing left except a lot of people getting rained on.
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
I like plays where people talk a lot. Conversation is sustained. Argument is sustained.
Tom Stoppard
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
Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.
Tom Stoppard
The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say.
Tom Stoppard
What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?
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
I really love being in postproduction. First of all, it's all quite self-interested: You can protect things.
Tom Stoppard
Good things, when short, are twice as good.
Tom Stoppard
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
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
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.
Tom Stoppard
Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!
Tom Stoppard
If enough things that are untrue are said about you, no one will know what really is true.
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
There is no one so radical as a man-servant whose freedom of the champagne bin has been interfered with.
Tom Stoppard
Uncertainty is the normal state.
Tom Stoppard
Chater: You dare to call me that. I demand satisfaction! Septimus: Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you are demanding satisfaction. I cannot spend my time day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family.
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