Tom Stoppard Quotes
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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.
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Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything!
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You think human nature is a beast, that it must be put in a cage. But it's the cage that makes the animal bad.
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Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?
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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.
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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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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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I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.
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Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway. Guildenstern: What? Rosencrantz: England. Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?
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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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The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It's essentially self-interested on the part of authority.
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I consider myself to be a very fortunate person and to have led a very fortunate life.
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No problem is insoluble, given a big enough plastic bag.
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Once rehearsals are done the writer really doesn't have a function on the set. If the script is stabilized, then the writer becomes a celebrity tourist visiting the set, trying not to get in the way. It's very good for the ego, to go visit a film set if you are the writer, because they give you a special chair, and tell you where you can sit to watch the monitor. They make you feel special, but at the same time, they make it perfectly plain that you are irrelevant!
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To be frank: the translations that often sound bad in the mouths of the actors, these have often been done by linguists.
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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 names for things don't come first. Words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.
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There is no one so radical as a man-servant whose freedom of the champagne bin has been interfered with.
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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.
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I know the British press is very attached to the lobby system. It lets the journalists and the politicians feel proud of their traditional freedoms while giving the reader as much of the truth as they think is good for him.
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You can persuade a man to believe almost anything provided he is clever enough, but it is much more difficult to persuade someone less clever.
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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.
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The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.
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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.