Tom Stoppard Quotes
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My scripts are possibly too talkative.
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Every exit is an entry somewhere else.
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Player: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life question your sitution at every turn.
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In England the rich own the poor and the men own the women.
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I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has never been in a play. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture.
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Fantasy flows in where fact leaves a vacuum.
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I take every possible side.
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I think theater ought to be theatrical ... you know, shuffling the pack in different ways so that it's -- there's always some kind of ambush involved in the experience. You're being ambushed by an unexpected word, or by an elephant falling out of the cupboard, whatever it is.
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Information is light. Information in itself, about anything, is light.
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People think there's a choice between smoking and immortality, but we've all got to die of something.
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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!
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It seems pointless to be quoted if one isn't going to be quotable ... it's better to be quotable than honest.
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Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.
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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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I'm a conservative kind of person. I don't think rightwing is quite the same thing. But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament.
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There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.
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My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
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Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, "Oh, for God's sake, shut up."
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Any revival in which I am involved is liable to change.
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It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.
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I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design.
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A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.
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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.
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The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.