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It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.

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
Matter
Arcadia
Wanting
Makes

More quotes by Tom Stoppard

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Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.
Tom Stoppard
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Between just desserts and tragic irony we are given quite a lot of scope for our particular talent. Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have got about as bad as they reasonably get.
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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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I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn't one's lover.
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You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form.
Tom Stoppard
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It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
Tom Stoppard
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Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!
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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Get me inside any boardroom and I'll get any decision I want.
Tom Stoppard
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If rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!
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.
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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Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight. Equilibrium is pragmatic. You have to get everything into proportion. You compensate, rebalance yourself so that you maintain your angle to your world. When the world shifts, you shift.
Tom Stoppard
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There is no one so radical as a man-servant whose freedom of the champagne bin has been interfered with.
Tom Stoppard
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Never believe in mirrors or newspapers.
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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A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
Tom Stoppard
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Writing a play is like smashing that [glass] ashtray, filming it in slow motion, and then running the film in reverse, so that the fragments of rubble appear to fly together. You start - or at least I start - with the rubble.
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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My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
Tom Stoppard