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I like plays where people talk a lot. Conversation is sustained. Argument is sustained.

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
Talk
Play
Like
People
Sustained
Plays
Argument
Conversation

More quotes by Tom Stoppard

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Words are sacred. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge the world a little.
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It's no trick loving somebody at their best. Love is loving them at their worst.
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It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.
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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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He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.
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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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The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say.
Tom Stoppard
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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.
Tom Stoppard
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I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design.
Tom Stoppard
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My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
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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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 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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Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos.
Tom Stoppard
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Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last.
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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If you were handed power on a plate you'd be left fighting over a plate.
Tom Stoppard
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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.
Tom Stoppard
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Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway. Guildenstern: What? Rosencrantz: England. Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?
Tom Stoppard