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Tom Stoppard
Thomas Stoppard (born July 3, 1937) British dramatist and screenwriter; born Tomáš Straussler in Czechoslovakia
'See also: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Shakespeare in Love
Sourced
Lord Malquist and Mr Moon
- 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.
- Lord Malquist, p. page number?
Artist descending a staircase
- Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
Attributed:
- A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
- A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar— you pretend it's not there.
- Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.
- From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.
- Good things, when short, are twice as good.
- I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to the death your right to say it.
- This is an ironic inversion of the famous statement usually attributed to Voltaire: "I disagree with what you say, but would defend to the death your right to say it."
- I still believe that if your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon.
- I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
- If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice.
- 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.
- If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.
- If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.
- It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing.
- It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.
- It's better to be quotable than to be honest.
- It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.
- James Joyce— an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.
- Life is a gamble, at terrible odds— if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.
- My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.
- My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.
- Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.
- Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.
- The days of the digital watch are numbered.
- The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.
- The truth is always a compound of two half-truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say.
- We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.
- We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain.
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