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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 -
The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.
Tom Stoppard
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Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.
Tom Stoppard -
...Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that what is taken to be true. It's the currency if living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions. What do you assume?
Tom Stoppard -
Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
Tom Stoppard -
The days of the digitals are numbered. The metaphor is built into them like a self-destruct mechanism.
Tom Stoppard -
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 -
There is presumably a calendar date a moment when the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, secretly, the noes had it.
Tom Stoppard
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Biography is the mesh through which real life escapes.
Tom Stoppard -
Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.
Tom Stoppard -
Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead.
Tom Stoppard -
Never believe in mirrors or newspapers.
Tom Stoppard -
A genuine love of learning is one of the two delinquencies which cause blindness and lead a young man to ruin.
Tom Stoppard -
the natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. strangely enough it all works out in the end... it's a mystery.
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 -
I consider myself to be a very fortunate person and to have led a very fortunate life.
Tom Stoppard -
Maybe Napoleon was wrong when he said we were a nation of shopkeepers... Today England looked like a nation of goalkeepers.
Tom Stoppard -
It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.
Tom Stoppard -
Your opinions are your symptoms.
Tom Stoppard -
Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.
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 -
The idea that all the people locked up in mental hospitals are sane while all the people walking about are mad is merely a literary cliche, put about by people who should be locked up. I assure you there is not much in it. Taken as a whole, the sane are out there the sick are in here. For example you are in here because you have delusions that sane people are put in mental hospitals.
Tom Stoppard -
There would be this algebraic equation with an equals sign in the middle, and all the components would have different letters of the alphabet. It would come out right with x+z^2+t/q=y+co, and the co would be clothes off!
Tom Stoppard -
No problem is insoluble, given a big enough plastic bag.
Tom Stoppard