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If you were handed power on a plate you'd be left fighting over a plate.

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
Plate
Handed
Plates
Fighting
Left
Power

More quotes by Tom Stoppard

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Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins.
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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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Hell is very likely to be modernization infinitely extended.
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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 shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has never been in a play. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture.
Tom Stoppard
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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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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?
Tom Stoppard
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Good things, when short, are twice as good.
Tom Stoppard
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The tragedy of journalism is that these are people doing their best work.
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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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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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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The causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about, which depend on causes we know absolutely nothing about.
Tom Stoppard
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We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.
Tom Stoppard
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I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.
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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There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.
Tom Stoppard
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I burn with no causes.
Tom Stoppard
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...Everything has to be taken on trust truth is only that what is taken to be true. It's the currency if living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions. What do you assume?
Tom Stoppard
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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.
Tom Stoppard