Tom Stoppard Quotes
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Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?
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ROS: Why don't you go and have a look? GUIL: Pragmatism?! - is that all you have to offer?
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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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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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I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.
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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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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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I take every possible side.
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If you took away everything in the world that had to be invented, there'd be nothing left except a lot of people getting rained on.
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If the audience is made to do not enough work, they resent it without knowing it. Too much and they get lost. There's a perfect pace to be found. And a perfect place that is different for every line of the play.
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Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum.
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I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.
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From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.
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I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn't wait to be out of education.
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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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Writing a play is like smashing that [glass] ashtray, filming it in slow motion, and then running the film in reverse, so that the fragments of rubble appear to fly together. You start - or at least I start - with the rubble.
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Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.
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Information is light. Information in itself, about anything, is light.
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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'm offended by things and take pathetic little stands against them.
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Death is the ultimate negative.
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War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don't want to be a hero.
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James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.
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If rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!