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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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Tom Stoppard
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: July 3
Dramaturge
Film Director
Journalist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Zlin
Sir Tom Stoppard
Pistols
Poets
Aim
Poet
Poetry
Perhaps
Says
Doe

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It takes character to withstand the rigours of indolence.
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My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
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My mind gets into a verbal mode.
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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.
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It would have been nice to have had unicorns.
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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.
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All mystical experience is coincidence and vice versa, of course.
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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.
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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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It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.
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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?
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In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness.
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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.
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I like plays where people talk a lot. Conversation is sustained. Argument is sustained.
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If you were handed power on a plate you'd be left fighting over a plate.
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I think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn't sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future.
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I don't write at the library, because I smoke when I work or would like the possibility of a smoke. Also, I need to be at my own desk.
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Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.
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I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.
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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.
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