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.
In order to design buildings with a sensuous connection to life, one must think in a way that goes far beyond form and construction.
In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity.
It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.
I began to realize that the camera sees the world differently than the human eye and that sometimes those differences can make a photograph more powerful than what you actually observed.
If you want to find out what a writer or a cartoonist really feels, look at his work. That's enough.
When I was a little boy, I was reading Dante and I was saying to myself 'Bravo, Dante, Bravo.' It's so beautiful, the music, the sound, the meaning. I felt like calling him by phone, like a friend.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.