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ROS: Why don't you go and have a look? GUIL: Pragmatism?! - is that all you have to offer?

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
Pragmatism
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More quotes by Tom Stoppard

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Sometimes directors feel a script needs something, but they're not sure what it is, so they show it to a friend if the friend is a writer, he ends up kicking around with that script for a while.
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My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
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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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.
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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.
Tom Stoppard
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I will take his secret to the grave, telling people I meet on the way.
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Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.
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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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Uncertainty is the normal state.
Tom Stoppard
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I don't keep a diary and I throw away nearly all the paper I might have kept. I don't keep an archive. There's something worrying about my make-up that I try to leave no trace of myself apart from my plays.
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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Save the gerund and screw the whale.
Tom Stoppard
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The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks.
Tom Stoppard
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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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A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.
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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He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.
Tom Stoppard
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I'm attracted to the past.
Tom Stoppard
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When I think of how things could have turned out, I feel as if I've dodged, not just bullets, but 6mm shells.
Tom Stoppard
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Each move is dictated by the previous one--that is the meaning of order
Tom Stoppard