Quote

Writing a play is like smashing that [glass] ashtray, filming it in slow motion, and then running the film in reverse, so that the fragments of rubble appear to fly together. You start - or at least I start - with the rubble.

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
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Glass
Ashtray
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Rubble
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More quotes by 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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Hell is very likely to be modernization infinitely extended.
Tom Stoppard
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The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.
Tom Stoppard
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You can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.
Tom Stoppard
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I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has never been in a play. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture.
Tom Stoppard
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My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.
Tom Stoppard
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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.
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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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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I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.
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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I like pop music. I consider rock 'n' roll to be a branch of pop music.
Tom Stoppard
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The tragedy of journalism is that these are people doing their best work.
Tom Stoppard
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ROS: Why don't you go and have a look? GUIL: Pragmatism?! - is that all you have to offer?
Tom Stoppard
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Never believe in mirrors or newspapers.
Tom Stoppard
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If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that. But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.
Tom Stoppard
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I've seldom minded other people's opinions, but the other side of that coin is that I've seldom been interested by them, um their opinions about me I mean.
Tom Stoppard
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Obviously, you would give your life for your children, or give them the last biscuit on the plate. But to me, the trick in life is to take that sense of generosity between kin, make it apply to the extended family and to your neighbour, your village and beyond.
Tom Stoppard
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Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything!
Tom Stoppard
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You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?
Tom Stoppard