A Quote by Tom Stoppard

You should not translate for more than two hours at a time. After that, you lose your edge, the language becomes clumsy, rigid. — © Tom Stoppard
You should not translate for more than two hours at a time. After that, you lose your edge, the language becomes clumsy, rigid.
The right kind of practice is not a matter of hours. Practice should represent the utmost concentration of brain. It is better to play with concentration for two hours than to practice eight without. I should say that four hours would be a good maximum practice time-I never ask more of my pupils-and that during each minute of the time the brain be as active as the fingers.
There is also a particular frustration that I have with language. It's so clumsy. And the reason I'm feeling that is more because on your breathing and your intonation than the actual words.
For a writer, New York works well. Literary work is very elitist. I worked two hours a day, maximum, and the time after that was very agreeable. I walked a lot with pleasure. Those two hours augmented the day. I wrote more here than in Paris, an entire chapter of a new novel.
Make sure you have an edge. Know what your edge is. And have rigid risk control rules.
Sometimes kindness can be delivered in a clumsy way. But it's far more sincere in its clumsiness than those distinguished men you read about in books. Your father was very clumsy.
No, obviously, the time goes by, the English gets better. Ever since I met Melanie, that was almost nine years ago now, you have to just speak the language continuously, hone every word. So, and the proof for me of that, was actually in theater. It has to be two hours and 45 minutes on the stage speaking a language that is not your language, and singing.
Language should fulfill your individual existence as a wholesome human being... Language should be more than just getting by.
One of my favorite tricks was taking a page and having the first student translate it from English into whatever language he or she was working on, and the next one would translate it back into English and then into the foreign language, and we'd go around the room and compare the two English versions at the end, and it would be amazing how much survived.
Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That's what it is: an edge; a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side.
So, you don't have laughs as a reference point any more, it becomes a bit of a science after that. And the last thing, you would love to be able to depend on a sense of spontaneity, but hours of waiting and then hours of repetition are not conducive to spontaneity so those are your obstacles. On the other hand it's a lot of fun. Plunging into a bit of physical comedy and abandoning all dignity, no one can really hurt you much after you much after that, once you've done it.
Your least frequent, most extreme exertions will have the greatest influence on your fitness. The peak moments of a workout count far more than the amount of time you spend working out. This is why a series of 40-yard sprints at full speed benefits you more than half an hour of jogging. It's also the reason why lifting a weight heavy enough to make your heart pound and your muscles burn counts more than spending hours at the gym always in your comfort zone, never truly challenging your body. When a work-out becomes an unvarying, monotonous routine, it loses its effectiveness.
Training is doing your homework. It's not exciting. More often than not it's tedious. There is certainly no glory in it. But you stick with it, over time, and incrementally through no specific session, your body changes. Your mind becomes calloused to effort. You stop thinking of running as difficult or interesting or magical. It just becomes what you do. It becomes a habit.
We cannot evolve faster than our language. The edge of being is the edge of meaning, and somehow we have to push the edge of meaning. We have to extend it.
There's a lot of films that have relatively rigid road maps because they have a script and others that are less rigid because they have less of a script, like 'Elephant.' The road map becomes more interpretive, maybe, than one with a detailed script. Editing-wise, they all have their problems.
The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book.
That movie [A Series of Unfortunate Events] told four books in two hours, and we have two hours per book. So we have eight hours to tell four books, and if people watch we'll get to tell more of them. There's only thirteen books, so there's only going to be two more seasons, but that allows for a lot of time to be in character and to maintain character.
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