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Sometimes people are so close to the material, they miss an important cross-reference. You can't drop this line because half an hour later, it affects that line. And the writer is the person who knows that immediately.
Tom Stoppard -
As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas. I have no illusions about that.
Tom Stoppard
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Underneath runs the main current of preoccupation, which is keeping one's nose clean at all times. This means that when things go wrong you have to pass the blame along the line, like pass-the-parcel, till the music stops.
Tom Stoppard -
I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.
Tom Stoppard -
There is no one so radical as a man-servant whose freedom of the champagne bin has been interfered with.
Tom Stoppard -
An artist is the magician put among men to gratify - capriciously - their urge for immortality.
Tom Stoppard -
GUIL: A scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defence against the pure emotion of fear
Tom Stoppard -
I really enjoy working on adaptations.
Tom Stoppard
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Good things, when short, are twice as good.
Tom Stoppard -
Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway. Guildenstern: What? Rosencrantz: England. Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?
Tom Stoppard -
We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.
Tom Stoppard -
Rosencrantz: Shouldn't we be doing something--constructive? Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? ... A short, blunt human pyramid...?
Tom Stoppard -
Words are sacred. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge the world a little.
Tom Stoppard -
A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma.
Tom Stoppard
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What did you have in mind? A short, blunt human pyramid?
Tom Stoppard -
I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.
Tom Stoppard -
I don't think Stoppardian has a precise definition.
Tom Stoppard -
To be frank: the translations that often sound bad in the mouths of the actors, these have often been done by linguists.
Tom Stoppard -
Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light.
Tom Stoppard -
I smoke too much whether it's going well or badly. After all these years, I definitely associate having a pen in my hand with having an ashtray just out of eye line.
Tom Stoppard
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The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.
Tom Stoppard -
They loved, and quarreled, and made up, and loved, and fought, and were true to each other and untrue. She made him the happiest man in the whole world and the most wretched, and after a few years she died, and then, when he was thirty, he died, too. But by that time Catullus had invented the love poem.
Tom Stoppard -
Save the gerund and screw the whale.
Tom Stoppard -
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.
Tom Stoppard