I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.
Interpretation
The quote reflects an author's tendency to over-write, suggesting a struggle between brevity and creativity.
In this quote, Tom Stoppard humorously acknowledges the challenge of expressing ideas concisely in writing. He admits to the temptation of crafting lengthy scenes when, in fact, a more succinct approach would suffice, highlighting the balance between artistic expression and the clarity of communication.
In practice
In a workshop on writing, this quote can be used to illustrate the importance of brevity in 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.
Why did I write? whose sin to me unknown_x000D_ _x000D_ Dipt me in ink, my parents', or my own?_x000D_ _x000D_ As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,_x000D_ _x000D_ I lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers came.
It was an unforgettable picture to see Chopin sitting at the piano like a clairvoyant, lost in his dreams; to see how his vision communicated itself through his playing, and how, at the end of each piece, he had the sad habit of running one finger over the length of the plaintive keyboard, as though to tear himself forcibly away from his dream.
I probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible. Through my 20s, and into my 30s, I began to become aware of how so much of my art and architecture has a decidedly Eastern character.
I'll give up this sort of touring madness certainly, but music-everything is based on music. No, I'll never stop my music.
Art is an experience, not an object.
When you see the films of certain young directors, you get the impression that film history begins for them around 1980.
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