Tom Stoppard Quotes
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Rosencrantz: Shouldn't we be doing something--constructive? Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? ... A short, blunt human pyramid...?
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I read for interest and enjoyment, and when I cease to enjoy it I stop.
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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.
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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.
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Save the gerund and screw the whale.
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Words are sacred. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge the world a little.
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Rewriting isn't just about dialogue, it's the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene. All these final decisions are best made when you're there, watching. It's really enjoyable, but you've got to be there at the director's invitation. You can't just barge in and say, "I'm the writer."
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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.
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Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.
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Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.
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"The [London] Times" has published no rumours; it's only reported facts, namely that other, less responsible papers are publishing certain rumours.
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What a fine persecution—to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.
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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.
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The causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about, which depend on causes we know absolutely nothing about.
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The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.
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Carnal embrace is sexual congress, which is the insertion of the male genital organ into the female genital organ for purposes of procreation and pleasure. Fermat’s last theorem, by contrast, asserts that when x, y and z are whole numbers each raised to power of n, the sum of the first two can never equal the third when n is greater than 2.
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If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice.
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Normally, even if you're on the set for 12 hours, there may be only a moment or two when you are actually useful.
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Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?
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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.
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It's where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it's for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn't matter where on what, it's the light itself, against the darkness, it's what's left of God's purpose when you take away God.
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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.
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We drift down time, clutching at straws. But what good's a brick to a drowning man?
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The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it's trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren't supposed to be in that part of the plan.