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Let me get it straight. Your father was king. You were his only son. Your father dies. You are of age. Your uncle becomes king." "Yes." "Unorthodox.
Tom Stoppard -
How the hell do I know what I find incredible? Credibility is an expanding field... Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight.
Tom Stoppard
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The hard part is getting to the top of page 1.
Tom Stoppard -
If you were handed power on a plate you'd be left fighting over a plate.
Tom Stoppard -
When people discuss his plays, he says that he feels like he's standing at customs watching an official ransack his luggage. He cheerfully declares responsibility for a play about two people, and suddenly the officer is finding all manner of exotic contraband like the nature of God and identity, and while he can't deny that they're there, he can't for the life of him remember putting them there. In the end, a play is not the product of an idea; an idea is the product of a play.
Tom Stoppard -
Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child
Tom Stoppard -
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 -
I have to go with what I do, and what I do has more to do with what people say to each other than telling a story through images. Of course, you're trying to do both. And there are some people who are brilliant at it, but I don't consider myself to be particularly good at it. My mind gets into a verbal mode.
Tom Stoppard
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I can put two and two together, you know. Do not think you are dealing with a man who has lost his grapes.
Tom Stoppard -
Suicide is no more than a trick played on the calendar.
Tom Stoppard -
"The [London] Times" has published no rumours; it's only reported facts, namely that other, less responsible papers are publishing certain rumours.
Tom Stoppard -
The names for things don't come first. Words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.
Tom Stoppard -
We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain.
Tom Stoppard -
We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.
Tom Stoppard
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To say that it is without pace, point, focus, interest, drama, wit or originality is to say simply that it does not happen to be my cup of tea.
Tom Stoppard -
If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice.
Tom Stoppard -
The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.
Tom Stoppard -
Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That reminds me—I spotted something between her legs that made me think of you.
Tom Stoppard -
Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life.
Tom Stoppard -
I read for interest and enjoyment, and when I cease to enjoy it I stop.
Tom Stoppard
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Of all forms of fiction, autobiography is the most gratuitous.
Tom Stoppard -
I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has never been in a play. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture.
Tom Stoppard -
Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight.
Tom Stoppard -
Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God's crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can't think of anything more trivial than quarks, quasars, big bangs and black holes.
Tom Stoppard