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I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.

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
Writing
Way
Disown
Statements
Fiction
Making
Write

More quotes by Tom Stoppard

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I like pop music. I consider rock 'n' roll to be a branch of pop music.
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I've got no interest in educating or instructing people.
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The fact is that people are attracted to new work and by new work.
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You think human nature is a beast, that it must be put in a cage. But it's the cage that makes the animal bad.
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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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Theater is a recreation. It can be much more, but unless it's recreation, I don't see the point of it.
Tom Stoppard
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Uncertainty is the normal state.
Tom Stoppard
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To say that it is without pace, point, focus, interest, drama, wit or originality is to say simply that it does not happen to be my cup of tea.
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I will take his secret to the grave, telling people I meet on the way.
Tom Stoppard
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You can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.
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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.
Tom Stoppard
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Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.
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For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.
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One bulls-eye and you're rich and famous. The rich get more famous and the famous get rich. You're the talk of the town....The sense of so much depending on success is very hard to ignore, perhaps impossible. It leads to disproportionate anxiety and disproportionate relief or disappointment.
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It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross.
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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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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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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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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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The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say.
Tom Stoppard