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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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Tom Stoppard
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: July 3
Dramaturge
Film Director
Journalist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Zlin
Sir Tom Stoppard
Depends
Causes
Littles
Little
Everything
Nothing
Depend
Absolutely

More quotes by Tom Stoppard

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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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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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Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!
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I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.
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A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.
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.
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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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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I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.
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 act, I don't direct, I don't design.
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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We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. but there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.
Tom Stoppard
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If rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!
Tom Stoppard
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I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.
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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My mind gets into a verbal mode.
Tom Stoppard
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I don't really have a system or set of principles. It's kind of common sense mixed up with instinct.
Tom Stoppard
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To be frank: the translations that often sound bad in the mouths of the actors, these have often been done by linguists.
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.
Tom Stoppard