If you took away everything in the world that had to be invented, there'd be nothing left except a lot of people getting rained on.


Tom Stoppard

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If you wish to be a success in the world, promise everything, deliver nothing.
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Let nothing disturb you. Let nothing frighten you. Everything passes away except God.
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If you wish to be success in the world, promise everything, deliver nothing.
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It was human nature. You didn't give everything away; if you did, you would have nothing left.
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If you once realize that to-morrow, if not to-day, you will die and nothing will be left of you, eve...
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Then the people that had been intended to be in charge under the normal operation ... took over ... ...
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How to change the world:
• spread positivity
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Reach out and help others. If you have the power to make someone happy, do it. Be a vessel, be the c...
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In the real world, they told you who to be, not the other way around.
RHODA BELLEZA
Everything in the world may be endured except continual prosperity.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Everything in the world may be endured, except continual prosperity.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Everything in the world may be endured except continued prosperity.
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Everything in the world may be endured except continual prosperity.
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Everything that can be invented, has been invented.
CHARLES H. DUELL
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
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Everything that can be invented has been invented
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It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has ...
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Let me get it straight. Your father was king. You were his only son. Your father dies. You are of ag...
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They played their hearts out tonight. If they didn't leave everything out there tonight, then you ha...
MIKE ARONSON
If you're doing something like 'Arcadia' by Tom Stoppard, which has been done millions a...
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The people of Lewisville should be proud of the response we were able to put on the ground. We had e...
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This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the mat...
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In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Everything that can be invented, has been invented. - 1899.
CHARLES H. DUELL
Man was very fortunate to have invented the book. Without it, the past would completely vanish, and ...
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If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because every...
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"If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because ever...
ALICE WONDERLAND
"If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because ever...
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But in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.
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...but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.
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Be encouraged. Hold your head up high and know God is in control and has a plan for you. Instead of ...
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I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation. •George Bernard Shaw It is better ...
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7 Rules to a Happy Life:

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What sweetness is left in life, if you take away friendship? Robbing life of friendship is like robb...
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That loss took away a lot of the swagger that we had coming into the new year.
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There seemed to be nothing left in the world, for I felt that Roland had taken with him all my futur...
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In the life of any actor or actress, there is inevitably a time when they will be eligible to act in...
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unless it...
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The man who said in 1899: Everything that can be invented has been invented - technically, wasn't he...
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To be, or not to be, that is the question.
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There Is a thing that every person in this world has and it is something that cannot be taken away;w...
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Be who you want to be not what others think you should be.
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If people just took it a day at a time, they'd be a lot happier.
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The most attractive thing about you should have less to do with your face or body and more to do wit...
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(From) the smiles on the kids' faces, you could really tell that you took them away from everything ...
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If you took some of the behavior that you see in the fashion world and put it anywhere else, it woul...
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We had nothing left. As a team they gave everything they had yesterday to get here.
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Everything looked good except for the shooting, and that was the difference. If we can get a little ...
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When there is no reason to be happy, that's all the reason you need to happy
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To be or not to be. That's not really a question.
JEAN-LUC GODARD
At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be publ...
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You know, let's put it this way, if all the people in Hollywood who have had plastic surgery, if...
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I look at things as 'Everything is meant to be.'
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Official boundaries are often hard to see. If you head north on Woodward Avenue, away from downtown ...
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Every exit is an entry somewhere else.
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A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.
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We give advice by the bucket, but take it by the grain.
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The notion that the 'leader' has the right to ask huge sacrifices of your generation for a n...
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When I was a reporter in Bristol, which I was between the years 1954 and 1960, the newspaper would g...
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My family was in Singapore when the Japanese War started. We were in Singapore at the time of Pearl ...
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It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing.
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Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?
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My brain cells are dying in their trillions.
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Age is a high price to pay for maturity.
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In Chekhov, everything blends into its opposite, just fractionally, and this is sort of unsettling. ...
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Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.
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The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.
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Every exit is an entry somewhere.
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I don't think I can be expected to take seriously any game which takes less than three days to reach...
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Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picni...
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We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our prog...
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We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the r...
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Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.
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It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
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If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.
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Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.
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From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.
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I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.
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If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice.
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A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it...
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In 2005, I got an email from Belarus Free Theatre. They were emailing playwrights in America and Eng...
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A 'human right' is, by definition, timeless. It cannot adhere to some societies and not othe...
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I feel that when I began writing, I had a need to know more about the play before I got into it. I t...
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My intention still is to write a play to commemorate, possibly rather skeptically, the 50th annivers...
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I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put ...
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Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.
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A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
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People have quite a simple idea about 'Anna Karenina.' They feel that the novel is entirely ...
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I have about a dozen cassettes lying about which I use in random order. Very often, I pick up a cass...
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I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of h...
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What Tolstoy is on about is that carnal love is not a good idea.
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Very often in Chekhov, where he exhibits a little bit of human behavior that you recognize as true, ...
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Chekhov understood that people are mysterious and can't be reduced to what we nowadays call '...
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I am not a mathematician, but I was aware that for centuries, mathematics was considered the queen o...
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Success is a sort of metaphysical experience. I live exactly as I did before - only on a slightly bi...
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There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we misse...
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Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very...
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If you let the plot be determined by what you feel is in the character's mind at that point, it ...
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I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocrac...
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One of the attractions of translating 'Heroes' is that it's not the kind of play that I ...
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After all these years, I definitely associate having a pen in my hand with having an ashtray just ou...
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Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the playwright got ther...
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I barely remembered my father; I'm confused between genuine memory and the few photographs that ...
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I'm good at being funny.
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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...
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A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, pop...
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If I hadn't left Czechoslovakia, I would have been dead.
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I just happen to know quite a lot of what happened in Czechoslovakia between 1968 and the fall of Co...
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I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don't feel Czech.
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The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelli...
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Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a...
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Each move is dictated by the previous one--that is the meaning of order
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Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move...
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Well I believe in the desirability of an optimal society.
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The whole notion of journalism being an institution whose fundamental purpose is to educate and info...
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One doesn't want one's democracy to behave like a dictatorial or fascistic police. One doesn...
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Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything...de...
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It's better to be quotable than to be honest.
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Life in a box is better than no life at all ... I expect.
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The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.
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We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on ...
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Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?
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The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always ...
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The days of the digital watch are numbered.
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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...
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I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
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I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to the death your right to say it.
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Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God
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We're actors - we're the opposite of people.
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It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.
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Pirates could happen to anyone.
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Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything... d...
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I think I enlist comedy to a serious purpose.
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That I have the right to express myself freely at all times in all circumstances entails the idea th...
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In the end, my children put me on to Pink Floyd when they were teenagers.
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Pink Floyd are one of a handful of bands I've listened to a lot and whose concerts I've been...
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When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need fi...
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You do know what's coming up when you're translating. I suppose the concentration, then, is ...
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Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.
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For me, the reputation for teaching language in general, and East European languages most particular...
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Like many people, I only knew of Ford Madox Ford through a book called 'The Good Soldier,' w...
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A free press needs to be a respected press.
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He's someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks the most interesting thing about any st...
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I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something th...
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In the period before the arrival of Mrs. Thatcher, politics had been in such low esteem. Everything ...
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It is no light matter to put in jeopardy a single life when it is the very singularity of each life ...
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Chater: You dare to call me that. I demand satisfaction!

Septimus: Mrs Chater demanded sa...
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THOMASINA:
But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great...
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Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie t...
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My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation f...
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I'm not one of those writers who insist they don't read reviews and don't care much abou...
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All of my scripts are based on other people's novels. Generally, I consider myself as one who wr...
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Life is a gamble, at terrible odds. If it were a bet you wouldn’t take it.
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I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that a...
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Lou Reed was a hero because he was an anti-hero.
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Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?
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It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can w...
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[Now] Bach ... a splash in the making.
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What a fine persecution - to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.
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Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order you can nudge t...
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Get me inside any boardroom and I'll get any decision I want.
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The sense of suppression, ... or self-suppression, and pressure generally which came off even this p...
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James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be un...
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The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility withou...
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My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other...
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A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's ...
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Eternity's a terrible thought
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We've traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without poss...
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We're actors. We're the opposite of people.
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the bewilderment and incomprehension of critics and audience.
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It's wholly deserved and I am completely thrilled. As a writer he has been unswerving for 50 years, ...
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wholly deserved and I'm completely thrilled.
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Every exit is an entrance somewhere else
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I don't respond well to the Olympic noise, which is the noise of nationalistic triumphalism.
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Years and years ago, there was a production of The Tempest, out of doors, at an Oxford college on a ...
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Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!
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I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has ne...
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It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to...
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It would have been nice to have had unicorns.
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It's where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is g...
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It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has ...
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Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That remin...
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I actually went to an Oasis concert. I thought they were a brilliant songwriting band.
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You can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires.
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Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherw...
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Carnal embrace is sexual congress, which is the insertion of the male genital organ into the female ...
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HANNAH: Don't let Bernard get to you. It's only performance art, you know. Rhetoric, they used to te...
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Life is a gamble at terrible odds, if it were a bet, you would not take it
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A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.
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It is an interesting view of atheism, as a sort of "crutch" for those who can't stand the reality of...
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The idea of the state is, or should be, a very limited, prescribed idea. The state looks after the d...
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I have a spasm of envy for the person that was killed by a falling bookcase, as long as it doesn'...
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I was an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values again...
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What is the society we wish to protect? Is it the society of complete surveillance for the commonwea...
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Even when the writing seems very frivolous, I'm puritanical. I don't mean my subject matter....
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The idea that public safety, the safety of the innocent, is an absolute which trumps every other con...
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I feel overestimated.
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I'm not a theoretician about playwriting, but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitche...
TOM STOPPARD
We're actors — we're the opposite of people!
TOM STOPPARD
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something w...
TOM STOPPARD
As a writer, Harold has been unswerving for 50 years,
TOM STOPPARD
If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any g...
TOM STOPPARD
I don't do interviews under false pretenses.
TOM STOPPARD
Despite the digital age, there is a very large number of venues and spaces that are looking for play...
TOM STOPPARD
I'm not like some other writers: I have no actual urgent need or desire to add to what's wri...
TOM STOPPARD
I've voted in every election - not always for the same political party and never with any degree...
TOM STOPPARD
I'm vaguely embarrassed by myself sometimes.
TOM STOPPARD
As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an ex...
TOM STOPPARD
I like dialogue that is slightly more brittle than life. I have always admired and wished to write o...
TOM STOPPARD
When I think of how things could have turned out, I feel as if I've dodged, not just bullets, bu...
TOM STOPPARD
I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have...
TOM STOPPARD
My scripts are possibly too talkative. Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally ...
TOM STOPPARD
Nobody would be killed on the roads if the speed limit were 10 miles an hour.
TOM STOPPARD
There we were - demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man...
TOM STOPPARD
Theater in New York is nearer to the street. In London, you have to go deep into the building, usual...
TOM STOPPARD
I don't think falling in love in Slovakia is much different from falling in love in Tunbridge We...
TOM STOPPARD
GUIL: It [Hamlet's madness] really boils down to symptoms. Pregnant replies, mystic allusions, mista...
TOM STOPPARD
A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.
TOM STOPPARD
There are certain sorts of jokes which have only to do with the substitution of the unexpected word ...
TOM STOPPARD
Schepisi is the sort of director who could, would, and frequently did phone me whenever he came acro...
TOM STOPPARD
Directors sometimes have good ideas that I wished I'd had, not on rewriting but simply on stagin...
TOM STOPPARD
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that...
TOM STOPPARD
The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.
TOM STOPPARD
You end up going to school plays quite a bit as a parent, there are a lot of kids who are doing the ...
TOM STOPPARD
Free to move, speak, extemporize, and yet. We have not been cut loose. Our truancy is defined by on...
TOM STOPPARD
Let me get it straight. Your father was king. You were his only son. Your father dies. You are of ag...
TOM STOPPARD
As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it...
TOM STOPPARD
All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and...
TOM STOPPARD
We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.
TOM STOPPARD
Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway.
Guildenstern: What?
Rosencrantz: England.
...
TOM STOPPARD