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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
Argument
Conversation
Talk
Play
Like
People
Sustained
Plays

More quotes by 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.
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For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.
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I think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn't sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future.
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Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway. Guildenstern: What? Rosencrantz: England. Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?
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Since we cannot hope for order, let us withdraw with style from the chaos.
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To say that it is without pace, point, focus, interest, drama, wit or originality is to say simply that it does not happen to be my cup of tea.
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The tragedy of journalism is that these are people doing their best work.
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Act first! The ideas will follow, and if not - well, it's progress
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Every exit is an entry somewhere else.
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Player: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life question your sitution at every turn.
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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.
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Theater is a recreation. It can be much more, but unless it's recreation, I don't see the point of it.
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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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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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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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Wars are fought for oil wells and coaling stations for control of the Dardanelles or the Suez Canal for colonial pickings to buy cheap in and conquered markets to sell dear in. War is capitalism with the gloves off.
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What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?
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.
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The results of the divorce between truth and human beings can be most graphically observed in politics.
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Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light.
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