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"Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... 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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"What's the meaning of ignore? You hear somebody, but you never asnwer to him!"

"Why certainly, words possess power. They do! But releasing their magic requires combining and arranging those words in the right order."

"Three carefully stringed words are worth more than a book of gibberish. It's not the word count but the impact of those words that counts."

"There's a lot of difference between listening and hearing."

"The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion."

"Listen should be on 60-70% and talking or speaking on from 40 up to 30%."

"When you open your mouth, listeners are offended. When you close your mouth, the expectant are offended. If a person seeks misdoing from you they will find it regardless of whether or not you deliver."

"If one is talking about a vile thing it is better to talk of it in coarse language, one is less likely to be seduced into excusing it."

"You can save hundred words with just one look!"

"If you speak, that is rain; if you speak too much, that is flood!"
Explore more quotes by Tom Stoppard


"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."


"Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. If the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final."


"He could not put down a word without suspecting that it might be the wrong one and that if he held back for another day the intermediate experience would provide the right one. There was no end to that, and Moon fearfully glimpsed himself as a pure writer who after a lifetime of absolutely no output whatsoever, would prepare on his deathbed the single sentence which was the distillation of everything he had saved up, and die before he was able to utter it."
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