Tom Stoppard Quotes
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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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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.
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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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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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Suicide is no more than a trick played on the calendar.
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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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The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.
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If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.
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Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light.
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Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?
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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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Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!
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A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.
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If knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing 'When Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you. 'She walks into beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that's best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.
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Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?
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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.
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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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Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight.
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If you were handed power on a plate you'd be left fighting over a plate.
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Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.
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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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Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life.
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Theater is a recreation. It can be much more, but unless it's recreation, I don't see the point of it.
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Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.