Writing a new play shouldn't be seen as a mystery belonging to a priesthood, but as a challenge, a technical challenge, just to get into it.
Interpretation
Writing a new play is an accessible challenge rather than an exclusive mystery.
This quote by Tom Stoppard emphasizes that playwrighting should not be viewed as an arcane art only understood by a select few. Instead, it should be perceived as a technical challenge open to all, encouraging aspiring writers to embrace the craft with a sense of curiosity and determination rather than intimidation.
In practice
During a workshop, you might say, 'Remember what Stoppard said about writing being a challenge and not a mystery.'
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there.
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.
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.
Writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.
Life is a shitstorm, in which art is our only umbrella." (spoken by character in a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa)
I design for the woman who loves being a woman.
I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness, and all manner of other unattractive, natural and inevitable things.
The greatness of a musician is measured by the degree of fanaticism he brings to his playing.
Writing fiction is an inherently political activity because people-even imaginary ones-do not live in vacuums... From Twilight to Romeo and Juliet to The Little Mermaid, no work of the imagination is truly apolitical, because the world and our hopes for it are always part of our stories.
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