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" It's so great in the theater when everyone catches up on the truth. "
Tom Stoppard
Everyone
Great
Theater
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" When I was 20, the idea of having a play on anywhere was just beyond my dreams. "
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" I flinch when I see my name in the newspapers. "
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" I'm hopeless at looking into myself and trying to see how things are working and why. "
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" A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set. "
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" All your life, you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it is like being ambushed by a grotesque. "
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" Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end? "
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" The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and inform and even, one might say, elevate, has altered under commercial pressure, perhaps, into a different kind of purpose, which is to divert and distract and entertain. "
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" You end up going to school plays quite a bit as a parent, there are a lot of kids who are doing the job as well as they can, but there's always one or two who seem much more at home in the world of impersonation. "
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" I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen. "
Tom Stoppard
Freedom
Dictatorship
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" People have quite a simple idea about 'Anna Karenina.' They feel that the novel is entirely about a young married woman who falls in love with a cavalry officer and leaves her husband after much agony, and pays the price for that. "
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Husband
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" The thing about talking about human rights is that when one bears in mind the sharp end of it, one does not want to worry too much about semantics. "
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Worry
Too Much
" 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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World
Think
Respect
" 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
" Directors sometimes have good ideas that I wished I'd had, not on rewriting but simply on staging. "
Tom Stoppard
Good
Sometimes
Ideas
" Embarrassingly enough, I often can't remember how I came to write something. "
Tom Stoppard
How
Enough
Write
" To be in love with Debo Devonshire is hardly a distinction. "
Tom Stoppard
Hardly
Distinction
Love
" I don't look at my work in a critical or analytical way; I just don't think of myself objectively. It doesn't interest me. "
Tom Stoppard
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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. "
Tom Stoppard
Work
Art
Know
" If you don't know what is being said, the rest of the actor's work is wasted. "
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Know
Actor
You
" I'm very unhappy about my entire life if my writing is going wrong. "
Tom Stoppard
Life
Going
Writing
" To be 64 is appalling, so what does it matter being 65? "
Tom Stoppard
Appalling
Does
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" I am not somebody who meets a man or a woman somewhere and feels like that is an incredible character that I must write into a play. "
Tom Stoppard
Like
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" One doesn't want one's democracy to behave like a dictatorial or fascistic police. One doesn't. "
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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. "
Tom Stoppard
Kind
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Same
" In my mind, I always knew what my father looked like. "
Tom Stoppard
Father
Always
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" 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
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" When I think of how things could have turned out, I feel as if I've dodged, not just bullets, but 6mm shells. "
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" If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation. "
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" I consider myself to be a very fortunate person and to have led a very fortunate life. "
Tom Stoppard
Very
Fortunate
Life