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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
Sustained
Plays
Argument
Conversation
Talk
Play
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People

More quotes by 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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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.
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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 but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form.
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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The causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about, which depend on causes we know absolutely nothing about.
Tom Stoppard
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It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross.
Tom Stoppard
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Give us this day our daily mask.
Tom Stoppard
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Having translated two plays by Chekhov, and not speaking Russian myself - I cannot say one sentence. This may shock people... However, I am not shocked, as it is not hard to find out what the words mean.
Tom Stoppard
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Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light.
Tom Stoppard
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What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?
Tom Stoppard
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In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness.
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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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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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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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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Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.
Tom Stoppard
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It would have been nice to have had unicorns.
Tom Stoppard
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It's where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it's for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn't matter where on what, it's the light itself, against the darkness, it's what's left of God's purpose when you take away God.
Tom Stoppard
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It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.
Tom Stoppard