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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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Tom Stoppard
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: July 3
Dramaturge
Film Director
Journalist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Zlin
Sir Tom Stoppard
Make
Lasts
Omit
Good
Last
Omission
Always
Ends
Rewrite
Things
Part
Grammar
Going
Continue
Work
Conversation
Much
Missing
Something
Chance

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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Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!
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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.
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Chater: You dare to call me that. I demand satisfaction! Septimus: Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you are demanding satisfaction. I cannot spend my time day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family.
Tom Stoppard
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My mind gets into a verbal mode.
Tom Stoppard
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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.
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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It seems pointless to be quoted if one isn't going to be quotable ... it's better to be quotable than honest.
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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Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.
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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I don't write at the library, because I smoke when I work or would like the possibility of a smoke. Also, I need to be at my own desk.
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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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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Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead.
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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You can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.
Tom Stoppard
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I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.
Tom Stoppard
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Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything!
Tom Stoppard
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Act first! The ideas will follow, and if not - well, it's progress
Tom Stoppard