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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

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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
Kind
Selfish
People
Noble
Blind
Completely
Stupid
Create
Uncorrupted
Society
Weren
Left
Generous

More quotes by 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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My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
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You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?
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Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn't death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees but it doesn't bring death home to anyone- it doesn't catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says- 'One day you are going to die.
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I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.
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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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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We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.
Tom Stoppard
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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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We must be born with an intuition of mortality.
Tom Stoppard
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My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation for the next play or, ideally, into it.
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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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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No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.
Tom Stoppard
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Each move is dictated by the previous one--that is the meaning of order
Tom Stoppard