Peter Shaffer Quotes

If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.

The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.

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.

I was an accomplice in my own frustration.

What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve over, does it?

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.

Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right.

Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it.

Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process.

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.

Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish.

My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London.

Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.

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.

The devil isn't made by what Mommy says or what Daddy says. The devil is there.

Can you think of anything worse one can do to anybody than take away their worship?

All I ever wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing and then made me mute.

The Normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes - all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults.

I think people nowadays do tend to blame their parents for everything.

A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave.

Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.

What use, after all, is man, if not to teach God His lessons?

I was born in Liverpool in England, and I lived there for the first nine years of my life.

The best of Mozart's works cannot be even slightly rewritten without diminishment.

Love is the only doorway from the prison of ourselves.

I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint.

Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art.

I think I did have fantasies about being an actor. In fact, I know I did.

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!'.

You can't always let people do their own thing.

You have your words, and I have mine.

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.

The rhetoric is the key to the character. It's the verbal music of the piece.

There is now, in my mouth, this sharp chain. And it never comes out.

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!

Tell me, before you call us servants, who served whom? And who, I wonder, in your generations, will immortalize you?

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!

That's what his stare has been saying to me all this time: 'At least I galloped - when did you?