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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.

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
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More quotes by Tom Stoppard

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I'm attracted to the past.
Tom Stoppard
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A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set.
Tom Stoppard
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I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.
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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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There is no one so radical as a man-servant whose freedom of the champagne bin has been interfered with.
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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.
Tom Stoppard
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I don't really have a system or set of principles. It's kind of common sense mixed up with instinct.
Tom Stoppard
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Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.
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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The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.
Tom Stoppard
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My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation for the next play or, ideally, into it.
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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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.
Tom Stoppard
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We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.
Tom Stoppard
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You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?
Tom Stoppard
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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!
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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.
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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In January 1962, when I was the author of one and a half unperformed plays, I attended a student production of 'The Birthday Party' at the Victoria Rooms in Bristol. Just before it began, I realised that Harold Pinter was sitting in front of me.
Tom Stoppard
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It takes character to withstand the rigours of indolence.
Tom Stoppard