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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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Tom Stoppard
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: July 3
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Film Director
Journalist
Playwright
Screenwriter
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Sir Tom Stoppard
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More quotes by Tom Stoppard

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A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.
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Give us this day our daily mask.
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In England the rich own the poor and the men own the women.
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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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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?
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I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.
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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.
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Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything!
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Rewriting isn't just about dialogue, it's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene. All these final decisions are best made when you're there, watching. It's really enjoyable, but you've got to be there at the director's invitation. You can't just barge in and say, I'm the writer.
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You think human nature is a beast, that it must be put in a cage. But it's the cage that makes the animal bad.
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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.
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Between just desserts and tragic irony we are given quite a lot of scope for our particular talent. Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go when things have got about as bad as they reasonably get.
Tom Stoppard
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Hell is very likely to be modernization infinitely extended.
Tom Stoppard
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The fact is that people are attracted to new work and by new work.
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I've got no interest in educating or instructing people.
Tom Stoppard
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I burn with no causes.
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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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I don't keep a diary and I throw away nearly all the paper I might have kept. I don't keep an archive. There's something worrying about my make-up that I try to leave no trace of myself apart from my plays.
Tom Stoppard
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I really love being in postproduction. First of all, it's all quite self-interested: You can protect things.
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A foreign correspondent is someone who lives in foreign parts and corresponds, usually in the form of essays containing no new facts. Otherwise he's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.
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