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I don't really have a system or set of principles. It's kind of common sense mixed up with instinct.

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
Mixed
Instinct
Principles
System
Common
Sense
Kind
Really

More quotes by 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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I never had any frustration about writing uncredited. I always felt that the satisfaction of doing it was in the doing of it, really, and getting recognised by the small number of people that know what you did.
Tom Stoppard
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Uncertainty is the normal state.
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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Get me inside any boardroom and I'll get any decision I want.
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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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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I burn with no causes.
Tom Stoppard
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Act first! The ideas will follow, and if not - well, it's progress
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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Each move is dictated by the previous one--that is the meaning of order
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
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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.
Tom Stoppard
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I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.
Tom Stoppard
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...reality, the name we give to the common experience.
Tom Stoppard
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Suicide is no more than a trick played on the calendar.
Tom Stoppard
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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.
Tom Stoppard
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It's not the voting that's democracy it's the counting.
Tom Stoppard
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Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.
Tom Stoppard
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Rosencrantz: Shouldn't we be doing something--constructive? Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? ... A short, blunt human pyramid...?
Tom Stoppard