I'm aware of my old plays and occasionally think about them, but I'm much more anxious about finding the next play.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of future creativity over past achievements.
Tom Stoppard expresses a sentiment common among artists and creators: while reflecting on past works can be valuable, the greater concern is always about moving forward and creating new, innovative work. This highlights the anxiety and drive that comes with the pursuit of continuous growth and creativity in one’s craft.
In practice
This quote could be used at a theater workshop to inspire aspiring playwrights.
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.
Never lose the childlike wonder. Show gratitude... Don't complain; just work harder... Never give up.
But, by just being myself, I end up touching a lot more people who might never have paid much attention to a female rapper.
Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die.
Astonishingly, at some point, a sputtering torch was thrust into her hands. Alma did not see who gave it to her. She had never before been entrusted with fire. The torch spit sparks and sent chunks of flaming tar spinning into the air behind her as she bolted across the cosmos-the only body in the heavens who was not held to a strict elliptical path. Nobody stopped her. She was a comet. She did not know that she was not flying.
Winners have the ability to step back from the canvas of their lives like an artist gaining perspective. They make their lives a work of art - an individual masterpiece.
Magic exists. Who can doubt it, when there are rainbows and wildflowers, the music of the wind and the silence of the stars? Anyone who has loved has been touched by magic. It is such a simple and such an extraordinary part of the lives we live.
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