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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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Tom Stoppard
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: July 3
Dramaturge
Film Director
Journalist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Zlin
Sir Tom Stoppard
Might
Ones
Right
Dead
Children
Respect
Incomprehension
Writing
Words
Nudge
Make
Speak
Poem
Think
Order
Sacred
Thinking
Littles
Writers
World
Little
Deserve

More quotes by Tom Stoppard

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My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
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Obviously, you would give your life for your children, or give them the last biscuit on the plate. But to me, the trick in life is to take that sense of generosity between kin, make it apply to the extended family and to your neighbour, your village and beyond.
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For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.
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I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design.
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You can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.
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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.
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Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.
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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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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 want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that. But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.
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War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don't want to be a hero.
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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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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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Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.
Tom Stoppard
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A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
Tom Stoppard
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Save the gerund and screw the whale.
Tom Stoppard
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Between just desserts and tragic irony we are given quite a lot of scope for our particular talent. Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have got about as bad as they reasonably get.
Tom Stoppard
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I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Endlessly.
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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I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn't one's lover.
Tom Stoppard