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For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.

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
Direction
Time
World
Compasses
Compass
Measure

More quotes by Tom Stoppard

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Player: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life question your sitution at every turn.
Tom Stoppard
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Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.
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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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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Plays...Maidens aspiring to Godheads and vice versa!
Tom Stoppard
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Words are sacred. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge the world a little.
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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The names for things don't come first. Words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.
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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I've got no interest in educating or instructing people.
Tom Stoppard
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It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.
Tom Stoppard
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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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Save the gerund and screw the whale.
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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You can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.
Tom Stoppard
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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.
Tom Stoppard
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I burn with no causes.
Tom Stoppard
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The fact is that people are attracted to new work and by new work.
Tom Stoppard
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You always end up with too much, so it's good to be part of the conversation about not just what you can omit, but how you are going to do the grammar of the omission, how you make things continue to work when there's something missing. It's your last chance to rewrite.
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