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" I don't do interviews under false pretenses. "
Tom Stoppard
False
Pretenses
Interviews
Related Quotes:
" For me, human rights simply endorse a view of life and a set of moral values that are perfectly clear to an eight-year-old child. A child knows what is fair and isn't fair, and justice derives from that knowledge. "
Tom Stoppard
Child
Justice
Knowledge
" Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster. "
Tom Stoppard
Theatre
Road
Obstacles
" Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self. "
Tom Stoppard
Deep
Think
Self
" One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you. "
Tom Stoppard
Left
Movement
Past
" In the period before the arrival of Mrs. Thatcher, politics had been in such low esteem. Everything was so hedged, so mealy-mouthed. Then along came this woman who seemed to have no manners at all and said exactly what she thought. Everyone's eyes were popping and their jaws were dropping, and I really enjoyed that. "
Tom Stoppard
Politics
Woman
Thought
" Like many people, I only knew of Ford Madox Ford through a book called 'The Good Soldier,' which is everybody's favorite Ford Madox Ford if they have one, but I came to read 'Parade's End' when it was suggested via Damien Timmer of Mammoth Screen. "
Tom Stoppard
Good
Like
Soldier
" If you let the plot be determined by what you feel is in the character's mind at that point, it may not turn out to be a very good play, but at least it will be a play where people are behaving in a kind of truthful way. "
Tom Stoppard
People
Character
Good
" The whole thing about writing a play is that it's all about controlling the flow of information traveling from the stage to the audience. It's a stream of information, but you've got your hand on the tap, and you control in which order the audience receives it and with what emphasis, and how you hold it all together. "
Tom Stoppard
Control
Information
Writing
" In January 1962, when I was the author of one and a half unperformed plays, I attended a student production of 'The Birthday Party' at the Victoria Rooms in Bristol. Just before it began, I realised that Harold Pinter was sitting in front of me. "
Tom Stoppard
Sitting
Birthday
Me
" Corporeal death is not the whole story. "
Tom Stoppard
Whole
Death
Story
" Quite early on, and certainly since I started writing, I found that philosophical questions occupied me more than any other kind. I hadn't really thought of them as being philosophical questions, but one rapidly comes to an understanding that philosophy's only really about two questions: 'What is true?' and 'What is good?' "
Tom Stoppard
Questions
Good
Thought
" I don't want to come over as some boringly self-deprecating person. But I don't see myself as a groundbreaking writer in the way plays are structured. "
Tom Stoppard
Over
Myself
Person
" The possibilities are infinite with new writing; every time you open a new script, there's no limit to what it might contain. "
Tom Stoppard
Time
You
Writing
" The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages. "
Tom Stoppard
Responsibility
Illusion
Power
" I've never really worked out this thought, and I don't know if I'm really conscious of it, but I can see there's an attraction about writing about a period that's over and isn't going to change colour while you look at it. "
Tom Stoppard
Look
Know
Writing
" The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists. "
Tom Stoppard
Media
Sounds
Convention
" I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something that - even if it can't be quantitatively measured as other subjects - it's as fundamental to all education. "
Tom Stoppard
Want
Support
Humanities
" A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there. "
Tom Stoppard
You
Watching
Someone
" When I was in my teens, I was very, very keen on being the author of a book. What the book was was secondary. I wanted it to be in hardback. I didn't care how thick or thin it was, and I didn't actually care what it was about. "
Tom Stoppard
Being
How
Thin
" I seem to be failing in my intention to be as boring as I possibly can be for self-protection. "
Tom Stoppard
Boring
Failing
Seem
" The notion that the 'leader' has the right to ask huge sacrifices of your generation for a notional future paradise - if you'd be good enough to lie down under the wheels of the juggernaut - that sentimental and self-aggrandising rationalisation for brute force and cowardice I felt from adolescence was wrong. "
Tom Stoppard
Leader
Lie
Generation
" Like most writers, I just create because I have a story to tell, really. "
Tom Stoppard
Create
Tell
Story
" I don't even know what my voice is to this day. "
Tom Stoppard
Know
Even
Voice
" The whole excitement for writing anything is quite intense. And for a day or two, you think you've done everything extremely well. The problems start on the third day, and continues for the rest of your life. "
Tom Stoppard
Life
Think
You
" To be in love with Debo Devonshire is hardly a distinction. "
Tom Stoppard
Hardly
Distinction
Love
" To be 64 is appalling, so what does it matter being 65? "
Tom Stoppard
Appalling
Does
Matter
" It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting. "
Tom Stoppard
Government
Democracy
Counting
" If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older. "
Tom Stoppard
Childhood
Become
Older
" I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory. "
Tom Stoppard
Believe
Radio
Famous
" I like the notion of theater as recreational. "
Tom Stoppard
Notion
Theater
Recreational