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 ability of humans to read meaning into patterns is the most defining characteristic we have.
Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. If either of these can be rendered sufficiently extensive in a country, the machinery of Government goes easily on. Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.
Skepticism relieved two terrible diseases that afflicted mankind: anxiety and dogmatism.
Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other.
Unlike Joseph her husband, Mary is neither upright nor pious, but she is not blame for this, the blame lies with the language she speaks if not with the men who invented it, because that language has no feminine form for the words upright and pious.
Do not feel certain of anything.
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