Tom Stoppard Quotes
To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.
Quotes to Explore
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Sometimes you just wonder whether people just don't have the sensitivity or decency. I'm a member of the media myself: I host a talk show. I know sometimes when you want to ask something, you can circumvent it with words and vocabulary. You don't suddenly just go out there and ask something directly in the pretense of being absolutely candid.
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When history is erased, people's moral values are also erased.
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Tell me what you'd like to hear me sing. I'll sing whatever you like, after which I'll take up a collection, if you don't mind.
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It's my private life, and it's not up for grabs.
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I love clothes but I have spent so much of my professional life creating an image of one kind or another that it is nice not to care about it in life and let your skin breathe.
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People are entitled to the presumption of innocence.
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Every director bites the hand that lays the golden egg.
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Whenever you do a new interpretation of a great, previous text of any kind, you always look for some kind of immediate significance right now.
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Being at the Apollo, I was always starstruck.
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Life is a canvas of many strokes where shades from different palettes meet into a picture so concrete that some forget it is their own, so become framed themselves.
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I've had completely gray hair since, like, 30.
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I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
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If I could gain 1,000 pounds and be healthy, I would love to do that.
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I go to the gym in the morning to warm up, and then I go to the mountain and train. Then I come home and go to the gym again to recover. But on travel days, you get pretty much no physical exertion.
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I am prepared to oppose a Jim Crow army till I rot in jail.
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Work means independence. It allowed me to shape my life on so many levels.
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In a repressed society, artists fulfil a sense of harking back to instant gratification, or immediate expression, by doing things that function on the edge of society, or outside of what is conventionally accepted.
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Without understanding yourself, what is the use of trying to understand the world?
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Consult your friend on all things, especially on those which respect yourself. His counsel may then be useful where your own self-love might impair your judgment.
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There was the time I bought three cars in the span of three or four weeks. It was crazy; it wasn't greedy. It was mine, my girl's, my mom's. I got Benzes for my ladies. But I felt crazy. You have to understand I come from a world where we're very modest. But that's not greedy. That's nice, right?
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When human beings lose their connection to nature, to heaven and earth, then they do not know how to nurture their environment or how to rule their world - which is saying the same thing. Human beings destroy their ecology at the same time that they destroy one another. From that perspective, healing our society goes hand in hand with healing our personal, elemental connection with the phenomenal world.
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If you've never been on anything before, they're not going to take a risk and give you a huge job 90 percent of the time. There are exceptions to that. I certainly wasn't an exception to that. I had to pay my dues big time, but I wish somebody would have explained, 'Look, your job is not to get work. Your job is to get better.'
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To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.
