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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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Tom Stoppard
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: July 3
Dramaturge
Film Director
Journalist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Zlin
Sir Tom Stoppard
Start
Sink
Dies
Cheap
Unawares
Actors
Scream
Melodrama
Death
Catch
Mechanics
Doesn
Knees
Skulls
Home
Says
Choke
Going
Bring
Whisper
Anyone
Mechanic

More quotes by Tom Stoppard

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He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.
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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It's not the voting that's democracy it's the counting.
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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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A circle is the longest distance to same point.
Tom Stoppard
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Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat? Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat. Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats. Guildenstern: No, no, no--what you've been is not on boats.
Tom Stoppard
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Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
Tom Stoppard
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I really love being in postproduction. First of all, it's all quite self-interested: You can protect things.
Tom Stoppard
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It would have been nice to have had unicorns.
Tom Stoppard
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The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.
Tom Stoppard
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Normally, even if you're on the set for 12 hours, there may be only a moment or two when you are actually useful.
Tom Stoppard
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Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That reminds me—I spotted something between her legs that made me think of you.
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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A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set.
Tom Stoppard
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The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.
Tom Stoppard
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I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has never been in a play. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture.
Tom Stoppard
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For a long time I managed to think two things simultaneously, that I am actually a good playwright, and that the next time I write a play I will be revealed as someone who is no good at all.
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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Theater is a recreation. It can be much more, but unless it's recreation, I don't see the point of it.
Tom Stoppard
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I've never written an original piece for film all the original things I've done are for the stage.
Tom Stoppard