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If you took away everything in the world that had to be invented, there'd be nothing left except a lot of people getting rained on.

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
Away
Everything
Nothing
Rained
World
Invented
People
Except
Took
Getting
Left

More quotes by 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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Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.
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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If enough things that are untrue are said about you, no one will know what really is true.
Tom Stoppard
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I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.
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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We must be born with an intuition of mortality.
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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A circle is the longest distance to same point.
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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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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It takes character to withstand the rigours of indolence.
Tom Stoppard
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Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
Tom Stoppard
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It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.
Tom Stoppard
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The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.
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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Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That reminds me—I spotted something between her legs that made me think of you.
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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If you were handed power on a plate you'd be left fighting over a plate.
Tom Stoppard
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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