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.
The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope.
He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise.
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
Not until we dare to regard ourselves as a nation, not until we respect ourselves, can we gain the esteem of others, or rather only then will it come of its own accord
there are worse things than being alone but it often takes decades to realize this and most often when you do it's too late and there's nothing worse than too late
The world as pure object is something that is not there. It is not a reality outside us for which we exist....It is a living and self-creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to which I am myself, my own unique door.
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