Tom Stoppard Quotes
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The fact is that people are attracted to new work and by new work.
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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.
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My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
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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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Death is the ultimate negative.
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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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Obviously, you would give your life for your children, or give them the last biscuit on the plate. But to me, the trick in life is to take that sense of generosity between kin, make it apply to the extended family and to your neighbour, your village and beyond.
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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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I really love being in postproduction. First of all, it's all quite self-interested: You can protect things.
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...reality, the name we give to the common experience.
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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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You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form.
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We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. but there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.
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Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat? Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat. Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats. Guildenstern: No, no, no--what you've been is not on boats.
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I like plays where people talk a lot. Conversation is sustained. Argument is sustained.
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Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.
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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.
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My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation for the next play or, ideally, into it.
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Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?
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The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.
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It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
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I write out of my intellectual experience.
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If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that. But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life.
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Give us this day our daily mask.