Tom Stoppard Quotes
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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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The hard part is getting to the top of page 1.
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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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Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight.
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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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Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life.
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I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn't one's lover.
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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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Of all forms of fiction, autobiography is the most gratuitous.
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To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.
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There we were - demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promises of vengeance - and every gesture, every pose, vanishing into the thin unpopulated air. We ransomed our dignity to the clouds, and the uncomprehending birds listened. Don't you see?! We're actors - we're the opposite of people!
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War is capitalism with the gloves off.
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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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Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.
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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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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.
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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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Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?
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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.
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My scripts are possibly too talkative.
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We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.
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We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain.
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A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set.
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I'm offended by things and take pathetic little stands against them.