I think of myself as a theater animal instead of an intellectual animal.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes valuing creative expression and performance over purely intellectual pursuits.
Tom Stoppard's quote suggests that he identifies more with the emotional and dynamic aspects of theater than with the analytical and cognitive aspects associated with intellectualism. It highlights the importance of creativity, passion, and the human experience in the field of theater, affirming that art can evoke feelings and connections that transcend mere intellectual thought.
In practice
During a film festival, this quote could be used to introduce a discussion about the role of creativity in cinema.
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.
Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition.
If an essay has a 'motive,' it is linked more to happenstance and opportunity than to the driven will. A genuine essay is not a doctrinaire tract or a propaganda effort or a broadside.
In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.
I feed on good soup, not beautiful language.
Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.
Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.