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.
What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?
A 90-minute time frame is not long enough to tell a good female story, and that's why long-format television has become so great for female storytelling and for female performers and directors and writers.
When we discovered cubism, we did not have the aim of discovering cubism. We only wanted to express what was in us.
The theater has to impose itself on the public, and not the public on the theater... The word "Art" should be written everywhere, in the auditorium and in the dressing rooms, before the word "Business" gets written there.
Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.
If we start putting music out constantly where people don't think no more, people go crazy. We're gonna lose the love of heart, of soul. And if the world lose that, I think the world is doomed.
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