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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 think that's the way I was thinking. But my actual experience is that the best way to find out what the structure is, is by writing the play out laterally. You just have got to be brave enough to start without knowing where you are going."
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"We are all artists, painting the world with our thoughts while coloring the universe with our deeds."

"My pond life with hydra is over, now I'm into the ocean world of poetry to dive deeper.."

"I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it."

"What may be myth in one world may always be fact in some other."

"One's writing is good only when the intelligence and the imagination are in equilibrium. As soon as one of them overbalances the other, it's all up; you may as well throw it away and begin afresh."

"Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other."

"You would be amazed by how I can torture the English language. I am an abusive lover."

"Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination."
Explore more quotes by Tom Stoppard


"It is a defect of God's humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them."


"We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else."


"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."


"Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That reminds me-I spotted something between her legs that made me think of you."


"James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized."


"Theater in New York is nearer to the street. In London, you have to go deep into the building, usually, to reach the place where theater happens. On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk, and you're lucky if the sound of a police car doesn't rip the envelope twice a night."
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