My scripts are possibly too talkative. Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, 'Oh, for God's sake, shut up.'
Interpretation
The quote humorously reflects on the tendency of writers to include excessive dialogue in their scripts.
In this quote, Tom Stoppard expresses a playful self-critique about his writing style, pointing out that sometimes characters in his scripts can be overly verbose. This highlights the importance of brevity and the balance between dialogue and action in storytelling, suggesting that less can often be more in conveying meaning and emotion.
In practice
This quote can be used by screenwriters to discuss the importance of concise dialogue during workshops.
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.
A work is perfectly finished only when nothing can be added to it and nothing taken away.
Translation is not original creation - that is what one must remember. In translation, some loss is inevitable.
When you are a beginning film maker you are desperate to survive. The most important thing in the end is survival and being able to get to your next picture.
I've never been one for keeping a journal, so my songs were my journals. They allowed me to express my feelings and let people know what was going on with me. I knew that somebody would relate.
The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random.
Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.
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