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You can persuade a man to believe almost anything provided he is clever enough, but it is much more difficult to persuade someone less clever.
Tom Stoppard -
Give us this day our daily mask.
Tom Stoppard
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One bulls-eye and you're rich and famous. The rich get more famous and the famous get rich. You're the talk of the town....The sense of so much depending on success is very hard to ignore, perhaps impossible. It leads to disproportionate anxiety and disproportionate relief or disappointment.
Tom Stoppard -
Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything!
Tom Stoppard -
Uncertainty is the normal state.
Tom Stoppard -
For 10 years of my life, 3 times a day, I thanked the Lord for what I was about to receive and thanked him again for what I had just received, and then we lost touch and I suddenly thought, where is he now
Tom Stoppard -
I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking.
Tom Stoppard -
I can't remember what my first script was.
Tom Stoppard
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Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, "Oh, for God's sake, shut up."
Tom Stoppard -
I don't write at the library, because I smoke when I work or would like the possibility of a smoke. Also, I need to be at my own desk.
Tom Stoppard -
I'm going to be dead before I read the books I'm going to read.
Tom Stoppard -
A foreign correspondent is someone who lives in foreign parts and corresponds, usually in the form of essays containing no new facts. Otherwise he's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.
Tom Stoppard -
I doubt that art needed Ruskin any more than a moving train needs one of its passengers to shove it.
Tom Stoppard -
Life in a box is better than no life at all... I expect.
Tom Stoppard
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Act first! The ideas will follow, and if not - well, it's progress
Tom Stoppard -
Personally I am in favour of education but a university is not the place for it.
Tom Stoppard -
I've seldom minded other people's opinions, but the other side of that coin is that I've seldom been interested by them, um their opinions about me I mean.
Tom Stoppard -
I'm attracted to the past.
Tom Stoppard -
We've traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.
Tom Stoppard -
Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don't like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical to ours.
Tom Stoppard
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The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.
Tom Stoppard -
I've got no interest in educating or instructing people.
Tom Stoppard -
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.
Tom Stoppard -
The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices—after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's.
Tom Stoppard