Tom Stoppard Quotes
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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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There is no one so radical as a man-servant whose freedom of the champagne bin has been interfered with.
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It's not so much that I enjoy screenwriting, though mostly I do, but the difference is, with adaptations, somebody else has done the hard part - made up a story, provided the characters.
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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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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 names for things don't come first. Words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.
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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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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 trouble is, I can't find a part of myself where you're not important. I write in order to be worth your while and to finance the way I want to live with you. Not the way you want to live. The way I want to live with you. Without you I wouldn't care. I'd eat tinned spaghetti and put on yesterday's clothes. But as it is I change my socks, and make money, and tart up Brodie's unspeakable drivel into speakable drivel so he can be an author too, like me.
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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 consider myself to be a very fortunate person and to have led a very fortunate life.
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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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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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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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Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?
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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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Words are sacred. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge the world a little.
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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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Save the gerund and screw the whale.
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Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child
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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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If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.
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I read for interest and enjoyment, and when I cease to enjoy it I stop.
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The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.