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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.
Tom Stoppard -
I like plays where people talk a lot. Conversation is sustained. Argument is sustained.
Tom Stoppard
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Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum.
Tom Stoppard -
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.
Tom Stoppard -
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.
Tom Stoppard -
Theater is a recreation. It can be much more, but unless it's recreation, I don't see the point of it.
Tom Stoppard -
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.
Tom Stoppard -
Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?
Tom Stoppard
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Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
Tom Stoppard -
I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.
Tom Stoppard -
Chater: You dare to call me that. I demand satisfaction! Septimus: Mrs Chater demanded satisfaction and now you are demanding satisfaction. I cannot spend my time day and night satisfying the demands of the Chater family.
Tom Stoppard -
Every exit is an entry somewhere else.
Tom Stoppard -
A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set.
Tom Stoppard -
Information is light. Information in itself, about anything, is light.
Tom Stoppard
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If enough things that are untrue are said about you, no one will know what really is true.
Tom Stoppard -
I was so thrilled being a reporter, because it gave you the kind of access to people that you wouldn't ever get to meet.
Tom Stoppard -
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.
Tom Stoppard -
The idea of the state is, or should be, a very limited, prescribed idea. The state looks after the defense of the realm, and other matters - raising revenue to pay for things which are for all of us, and so on. That idea has turned turtle now. The state isn't any longer perceived as an institution which exists to serve us.
Tom Stoppard -
What a fine persecution—to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.
Tom Stoppard -
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.
Tom Stoppard
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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!
Tom Stoppard -
I'm offended by things and take pathetic little stands against them.
Tom Stoppard -
Theater is still a medium which attracts young writers. You'd think that it would be all over by now, with television and film. But it's not.
Tom Stoppard -
Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins.
Tom Stoppard