Tom Stoppard Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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Let us go forward in this battle fortified by conviction that those who labour in the service of a great and good cause will never fail.
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I tested for a couple of pilots, but they said I was too tall.
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One ever feels his twoness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
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I would like to direct.
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The more I talk about things, the more I understand myself.
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I write synopses after the book is completed. I can't write it beforehand, because I don't know what the book's about. I invent something for my publisher because he asks for one, but the final book ends up very differently.
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I'm the most Colombian of the Colombians, even though I've lived 47 years outside of Colombia. I've lived 13 years in New York, and I never did a painting about New York. I've lived in France more than 30 years, and I've never painted Paris.
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The reason that the all-American boy prefers beauty to brains is that he can see better than he can think.
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I'd like to imagine that in order to beat me a person would have to play almost perfect tennis.
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In South Africa, being Chinese meant I wasn't white and I wasn't black. I trained in Baragwanath Hospital, the largest black hospital in South Africa. That was around 1976, the time of the Soweto Uprising, when police fired on children and students who were protesting. I was part of the group of interns who volunteered to treat them.
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Theo van Doesburg wanted to teach in the Bauhaus in 1922. I refused, however, to appoint him since I considered him to be too aggressive and too rigidly theoretical: he would have wrought havoc in the Bauhaus through his fanatic attitude, which ran counter to my own broader approach.
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Doing stunt work is risky, but it's something I enjoy.
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The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
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But acting just sort of happened and I found that I loved it. It was such a challenge.
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There's definitely something transformative about clothes.
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Just as soaps were very pivotal in the transition from radio to television, they will be right in the thick of things again in the transition from television to the Internet. Exciting news.
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American power worldwide is at its historic zenith.
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Popular culture is simply a reflection of what the majority seems to want.
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I've always felt a great affinity with music. I've felt myself to be more of a musician than anything else, though I'm not proficient in any one instrument. But I think I have a musical sense of things... and writing seems to me to be a musical experience - rhythmically and in many other ways.
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Democracy is a daring concept - a hope that we'll be best governed if all of us participate in the act of government. It is meant to be a conversation, a place where the intelligence and local knowledge of the electorate sums together to arrive at actions that reflect the participation of the largest possible number of people.
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I fancy the character of a poet is in every country the same,--fond of enjoying the present, careless of the future; his conversation that of a man of sense, his actions those of a fool.
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Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.
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If you wanted to show a mirror to people that says, 'You've been drunk on money,' they're not going to want to see it. But if you reflected that mirror on another time they'd be willing to. People will need an explanation of where we are and where we've been, and 'The Great Gatsby' can provide that explanation.
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Biography is the mesh through which real life escapes.
