You are the plays you write. How on earth could you write them otherwise? They're projections of your own predilections.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that our creations reflect our inner thoughts and preferences.
Tom Stoppard's quote emphasizes the idea that our artistic expressions, including the works we create, are deeply rooted in our personal experiences, beliefs, and inclinations. It implies that to understand our art, one must explore the inner workings of our minds, as they are the true source of inspiration and storytelling. Each piece we write is a manifestation of who we are, suggesting that our identity and creativity are intertwined.
In practice
In a discussion about the influence of personal experiences on storytelling.
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.
Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.
Man must be arched and buttressed from within, else the temple wavers to the dust.
Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think...of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the 'right' notes and the 'wrong' ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.
A healthy church is not a church that's perfect and without sin. It has not figured everything out. Rather, it's a church that continually strives to take God's side in the battle against the ungodly desires and deceits of the world, our flesh, and the devil. It's a church that continually seeks to conform itself to God's Word.
I was born and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life.
As long as you don't practice it, this dying and becoming, You are only a dreary guest on this dark earth.
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