A Quote by Tom Stoppard

Embarrassingly enough, I often can't remember how I came to write something. — © Tom Stoppard
Embarrassingly enough, I often can't remember how I came to write something.
I came to Nashville in the early '90s, and I thought, 'OK, enough is enough. I write songs; I just don't have the backbone to show it to anybody. I want to go to Nashville and learn how to properly write a song.'
Every so often I take out a volume and read a page or two. After all, reading is looking after in a manner of speaking. Though they're not old enough to be valuable for their age alone, nor important enough to be sought after by collectors, my charges are dear to me, even if, as often as not, they are as dull on the inside as on the outside. No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.
Don’t let yourself be. Find something new to try, something to change. Count how often it succeeds and how often it doesn’t. Write about it. Ask a patient or a colleague what they think about it. See if you can keep the conversation going.
It's not nuclear physics. You always remember that. But if you write about sports long enough, you're constantly coming back to the point that something buoys people; something makes you feel better for having been there. Something of value is at work there...Something is hallowed here. I think that something is excellence.
That's how I am and how I've always looked at the world. I understood what the pavilions were before I came to Venice, and I knew that wasn't going to be enough for me. I wanted to extend this conversation into something I call urgency. There is urgency with people in crisis. Some communities - often the black community - just live in this urgency.
When it was suggested that I write a memoir I said, 'I'm not old enough. I'm not distinguished enough.' But I went home and sat down to write, and the material for the book just came flooding into my hands.
I remember, I remember, The house where I was born, The little window where the sun Came peeping in at morn; He never came a wink too soon, Nor brought too long a day, But now, I often wish the night Had borne my breath away!
How do we remember to remember? That's a question I've asked myself often since my time on Duma Key, often in the small hours of the morning, looking up into the absence of light, remembering absent friends. Sometimes in those little hours I think about the horizon. You have to establish the horizon. You have to mark the white. A simple enough act, you might say, but any act that re-makes the world is heroic. Or so I've come to believe.
I sometimes have to write for a while before I figure it out, pretend that I know what I'm doing, sort of like ad-libbing on stage until you remember your line - you hope you sound convincing to the audience. The key is to have enough material, enough threads, so that there's something that can be satisfyingly drawn to a conclusion.
Remember, you didn’t come here to write your heart out. You came to write it in.
Seth Green, he and I are trying to figure out how this all came about. Because we don't remember what came first, the chicken or the egg, no pun intended. But I don't remember what came first, 'Robot Chicken' or our friendship, because we've known each other for so long.
You write a song about how you think at the time, and then gradually you drift away from that, and when it's far enough in the past, that's when you think, 'Now I have to write something new.'
When the idea comes, I often can't remember where it came from. I remember very little about writing the first series of Hitchhiker's. It's almost as if someone else wrote it.
How is it that we remember the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not remember how often we have recounted it to the same person?
Every time you finish something ... you figure you've finally learned to write, right? Then you start something else and it turns out you haven't. You have learned how to write that story, or that book, but you haven't learned how to write the next one.
I wish I could remember how to write a play. I can't remember how they happened.
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