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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
Principles
System
Common
Sense
Kind
Really
Mixed
Instinct

More quotes by Tom Stoppard

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If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that. But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.
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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Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat? Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat. Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats. Guildenstern: No, no, no--what you've been is not on boats.
Tom Stoppard
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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 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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A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.
Tom Stoppard
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I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.
Tom Stoppard
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It's no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst.
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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We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.
Tom Stoppard
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Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.
Tom Stoppard
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Real data is messy. ...It's all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it's playing your song, but unfortunately it's out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk- I mean, the noise! Impossible!
Tom Stoppard
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One of the nice things about the world of filmmaking is that you make friends in the business.
Tom Stoppard
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Player: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life question your sitution at every turn.
Tom Stoppard
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It would have been nice to have had unicorns.
Tom Stoppard
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I like pop music. I consider rock 'n' roll to be a branch of pop music.
Tom Stoppard
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In England the rich own the poor and the men own the women.
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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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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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