Quotes by Peter Shaffer

• You can't always let people do their own thing.
• 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.
• Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.
• 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.
• Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process.
• 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.
• Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• I was an accomplice in my own frustration.
• Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.
• 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.
• I think I did have fantasies about being an actor. In fact, I know I did.
• I think people nowadays do tend to blame their parents for everything.
• 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.
• I think possibly the first film that has music as its leading character.
• If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.
• I was born in Liverpool in England, and I lived there for the first nine years of my life.
• Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it.