I get the impression sometimes that a play arrives in a sequence of events that I have no control over.
Interpretation
The creative process can feel beyond the artist's control, influenced by external circumstances.
This quote by Tom Stoppard reflects the notion that the creation of art, particularly in theater, does not always stem from the artist's deliberate intention. Often, plays evolve through a series of unforeseen events and collaborative interactions, suggesting that the creative journey is as much about serendipity and collective input as it is about individual vision.
In practice
Using this quote in a discussion about the unpredictable nature of art creation.
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.
One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
To put down an ideogram of a table so that people will recognize it as a table is not the work of a painter, but to sense it for a moment as a magic carpet with a leg hanging down at each corner is the beginning of a painter's imagination.
As in creating some significant work the artist first experiences something akin to dream awareness that becomes clarified in the creative process itself, so we must first have a vision of the future sufficiently entrancing that it will sustain us in the transformation of the human project that is now in process.
Like books and black lives - albums still matter. Tonight and always.
All art is an abstraction to some degree.
I had so much fun doing Django, and I love westerns so much that after I taught myself how to make one, it's like, 'OK, now let me make another one now that I know what I'm doing.'
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