Top 66 Peter Shaffer Quotes
#1. God was singing through this little man to all the world.
Peter Shaffer
#2. Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process.
Peter Shaffer
#3. Look, life is only comprehensible through a thousand local gods ... spirits of certain trees, of certain curves of brick walls, of certain fish and chip shops if you like. And slate roofs, and frowns in people, and slouches ... I'd say to them, Worship all you can see, and more will appear ...
Peter Shaffer
#4. All my wife has ever taken from the Mediterranean - from that whole vast intuitive culture - are four bottles of Chianti to make into lamps, and two china condiment donkeys labelled Sally and Peppy.
Peter Shaffer
#5. My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London.
Peter Shaffer
#6. Black Comedy is a farce that is played in the dark, as you know, with the lights full on. It's the Chinese convention of reversing light and dark, and exactly where anybody is at any given moment is the play.
Peter Shaffer
#7. The Devil isn't made by what Mommy says, or what Daddy says. The Devil is there.
Peter Shaffer
#8. When Equus leaves - if he leaves at all - it will be with your intestines in his teeth.
Peter Shaffer
#10. There is now, in my mouth, this sharp chain. And it never comes out.
Peter Shaffer
#12. What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve over, does it?
Peter Shaffer
#13. I've seen the most remarkable thing. It's in the New York Public Library. They've got the original typescript of 'The Importance of Being Earnest' - all four acts of it.
Peter Shaffer
#14. I was brought up in an Orthodox Jewish household. I don't think I ever had a single discussion with my parents about faith. It was just something gently imposed.
Peter Shaffer
#15. Figaro is a bad play. It stirs up hatred between the classes. In France, it has caused nothing but bitterness. My own dear sister,Antoinette, writes me that she is beginning to be frightened of her own people.
Peter Shaffer
#16. Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it.
Peter Shaffer
#17. I cannot accept merely ... I do not do anything merely.
Peter Shaffer
#18. The best of Mozart's works cannot be even slightly rewritten without diminishment.
Peter Shaffer
#19. Emperor Joseph II: My dear young man, don't take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It's quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that's all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect.
Mozart: Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?
Peter Shaffer
#20. I think plays, like books, are endemic. They grow out of the soil of the writer and the place he's writing about. I think, you just can't move them about, you know.
Peter Shaffer
#21. A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave.
Peter Shaffer
#22. But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.
Peter Shaffer
#23. In London, 'Equus' caused a sensation because it displayed cruelty to horses; in New York, because it allegedly displayed cruelty to psychiatrists.
Peter Shaffer
#24. I was born in Liverpool in England, and I lived there for the first nine years of my life.
Peter Shaffer
#25. If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.
Peter Shaffer
#26. We ... our war began September the 3rd 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany, and thereafter the great state of danger in England at that time, with the bombings, necessitated the evacuation of children.
Peter Shaffer
#27. The trouble is if you don't spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.
Peter Shaffer
#28. Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.
Peter Shaffer
#29. You never quite know what's going to strike your imagination, or something that won't going to leave you alone, not going to leave alone, and this was one for me.
Peter Shaffer
#30. Love is the only doorway from the prison of ourselves.
Peter Shaffer
#31. I'll give him the good Normal world where we're tethered beside them - blinking our nights away in a non-stop drench of cathode-ray over our shrivelling heads!
Peter Shaffer
#32. Do you know what it's like for two people to live in the same house as if they were in different parts of the world?
Peter Shaffer
#34. Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right.
Peter Shaffer
#35. I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint.
Peter Shaffer
#36. The rhetoric is the key to the character. It's the verbal music of the piece.
Peter Shaffer
#37. Can you think of anything worse one can do to anybody than take away their worship?
Peter Shaffer
#38. That's what his stare has been saying to me all this time: 'At least I galloped - when did you?
Peter Shaffer
#39. Tell me, before you call us servants, who served whom? And who, I wonder, in your generations, will immortalize you?
Peter Shaffer
#40. I made, over the years in Cambridge, several very good American friends, and America appeared to me, a land of promise in every sense of that word, a land of freedom from the inhibitions and restrictions that I felt in England.
Peter Shaffer
#41. A part of me is always envious of people who live in the present and are sustained by a sense of spontaneity. Even dogs have that capacity: they're always wanting to participate in something, and I don't often have that element in me.
Peter Shaffer
#42. I think possibly the first film that has music as its leading character.
Peter Shaffer
#43. I really believe that studying organization, even in the form of studying detective story organization, is very, very valuable for a playwright, a budding playwright.
Peter Shaffer
#44. Things rust, you know, like the heart. My cardiologist said, 'It's a pump; use it - that's the sole advice I've got to give you.' It's the same in playwriting. Don't theorise about it. Do it.
Peter Shaffer
#45. What did I expect of him? Very little, I promise you. One more dented little face. One more adolescent freak. The usual unusual. One great thing about being in the adjustment business: you're never short of customers.
Peter Shaffer
#46. All I ever wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing and then made me mute.
Peter Shaffer
#47. The conquistadors and their followers were very rough people, and they were fixated on gold and silver. They were oblivious to the astonishing achievements of the Inca civilisation.
Peter Shaffer
#48. It is very, very difficult for a playwright to write a scene in which a young man has his first deep experience of sex with a girl whom he found immensely attractive, is fully satisfied by this event and gets up and blinds a lot of horses.
Peter Shaffer
#49. What use, after all, is man, if not to teach God His lessons?
Peter Shaffer
#50. It's an extraordinary thing about Mozart is that you never tire of him ... he never bores me, and he doesn't ... not only bore me, that's too strong a word.
Peter Shaffer
#51. Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish.
Peter Shaffer
#52. There used to be a certain condescension to Mozart. His music was regarded as pleasant. He was a porcelain figure playing a porcelain harpsichord.
Peter Shaffer
#53. I think I did have fantasies about being an actor. In fact, I know I did.
Peter Shaffer
#54. I'd be willing to bet that any incursion throughout history in which the invading country has proclaimed it is bringing benefits to the conquered is based on a lie.
Peter Shaffer
#55. You can't always let people do their own thing.
Peter Shaffer
#56. I think people nowadays do tend to blame their parents for everything.
Peter Shaffer
#57. I looked on astounded as from his ordinary life he made his art. We were both ordinary men, he and I. Yet from the ordinary he created Legends
and I from Legends created only the ordinary!
Peter Shaffer
#58. At home we can say to our ladies: 'I love you', or to our native earth. It means we rejoice in their lives ... Love must be free, or else it alters away. Command it to your court: it will send a deputy.
Peter Shaffer
#59. And in fact, I think one of the best guides to telling you who you are, and I think children use it all the time for this purpose, is fantasy.
Peter Shaffer
#60. Oh, you monster!No one exists but you, do they? You and your music!
Peter Shaffer
#61. Our function as playwrights to some extent is to make audiences see with their ears, because films make us see with our eyes much better.
Peter Shaffer
#62. Look ... to go through life and call it yours - your life - you first have to get your own pain. Pain that's unique to you. You can't just dip into the common bin and say 'That's enough!' ...
Peter Shaffer
#63. Art and literature are my surrogate religions.
Peter Shaffer
#64. I discover what I mean as I write. That can be both terrifically exciting and very dangerous, because when you look at your words later, you wonder, 'Did I really mean that, or am I just making verbal patterns?'
Peter Shaffer
#66. They look so expectant, and then they look so depressed ... that was the other great lesson that The Royal Hunt of the Sun taught me, it was the profundity that masked drama can achieve, that of course, the audience were not seeing masks moving at all.
Peter Shaffer
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