Theatre is a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
Interpretation
Theatre presents numerous challenges that can lead to failure, yet it remains an engaging art form.
This quote by Tom Stoppard highlights the inherent challenges in theatrical productions, suggesting that the journey of creating art is fraught with difficulties and potential failures. Despite these obstacles, the excitement and immediacy of theatre draw people in, emphasizing both the risks and rewards of artistic expression.
In practice
During a speech at a drama festival, one might say, 'As Tom Stoppard once noted, theatre is filled with insurmountable obstacles, reminding us of the resilience required in the arts.'
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.
Mere poets are sottish as mere drunkards are, who live in a continual mist, without seeing or judging anything clearly. A man should be learned in several sciences, and should have a reasonable, philosophical and in some measure a mathematical head, to be a complete and excellent poet.
I don't know what the hell I'm doing up there half the time. These performers that go on about their technique and craft - oh, puleeze! How boring! I don't know what technique means. But I do know what experience is. I know in my gut when I've done a scene right.
Thank God, I can look at a sunset now without having to think how to describe it
The fiction writer in me likes gaps in stories because I can jump into that gap and try to suggest something.
A jazz musician is not a jazz musician when he or she is eating dinner or when he or she is with his parents or spouse or neighbors. He's above all a human being . . . the true artform is being a human being.
The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul.
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