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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
Like
People

More quotes by Tom Stoppard

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If enough things that are untrue are said about you, no one will know what really is true.
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Personally I am in favour of education but a university is not the place for it.
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I like pop music. I consider rock 'n' roll to be a branch of pop music.
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I'm attracted to the past.
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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.
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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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Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.
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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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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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Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.
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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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
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A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set.
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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...reality, the name we give to the common experience.
Tom Stoppard
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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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War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don't want to be a hero.
Tom Stoppard
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In January 1962, when I was the author of one and a half unperformed plays, I attended a student production of 'The Birthday Party' at the Victoria Rooms in Bristol. Just before it began, I realised that Harold Pinter was sitting in front of me.
Tom Stoppard
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It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
Tom Stoppard
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Left to themselves people are noble, generous, uncorrupted, they'd create a completely new kind of society if only people weren't so blind, stupid and selfish.
Tom Stoppard