Quote

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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Tom Stoppard
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: July 3
Dramaturge
Film Director
Journalist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Zlin
Sir Tom Stoppard
Good
Left
Shine
Away
Useless
Doesn
Useful
Light
Shining
Elaboration
Matter
Sake
Humanness
Take
Darkness
Nearest
Real
Knowledge
Faint
Thing
Purpose
Hearted

More quotes by 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.
Tom Stoppard
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Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos.
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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We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. but there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.
Tom Stoppard
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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.
Tom Stoppard
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I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.
Tom Stoppard
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Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.
Tom Stoppard
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Save the gerund and screw the whale.
Tom Stoppard
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Your opinions are your symptoms.
Tom Stoppard
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I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking.
Tom Stoppard
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It's not the voting that's democracy it's the counting.
Tom Stoppard
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I like plays where people talk a lot. Conversation is sustained. Argument is sustained.
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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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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The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.
Tom Stoppard
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I never had any frustration about writing uncredited. I always felt that the satisfaction of doing it was in the doing of it, really, and getting recognised by the small number of people that know what you did.
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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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
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To be frank: the translations that often sound bad in the mouths of the actors, these have often been done by linguists.
Tom Stoppard
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I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.
Tom Stoppard