Peter Shaffer Quotes & Sayings

Love is the only doorway from the prison of ourselves. — Peter Shaffer

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

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

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

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

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

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

The trouble is if you don't spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you. — Peter Shaffer

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

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

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

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

He'll be delivered from madness. What then? He'll feel himself acceptable! What then? Do you think feelings like his can be simply re-attached, like plasters? Stuck on to other objects we select? Look at him! ... My desire might be to make this boy an ardent husband - a caring citizen - a worshipper of abstract and unifying God. My achievement, however, is more likely to make a ghost! — Peter Shaffer

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

But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own. — Peter Shaffer

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

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

The Devil isn't made by what Mommy says, or what Daddy says. The Devil is there. — Peter Shaffer

I was an accomplice in my own frustration. — Peter Shaffer

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

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

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

Oh, you monster!No one exists but you, do they? You and your music! — Peter Shaffer

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

Worship isn't destructive, Martin. I know that.
I don't. I only know it's the core of his life. What else has he got? He can hardly read. He knows no physics or engineering to make to world real for him. No paintings to show him how others have enjoyed it. No music except television jingles. No history except tales from a desperate mother. No friends. Not one kid to give him a joke, or make him know himself more moderately. He's a modern citizen for whom society doesn't exist. — Peter Shaffer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I cannot accept merely ... I do not do anything merely. — Peter Shaffer

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

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

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

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

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

I think possibly the first film that has music as its leading character. — Peter Shaffer

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

In London, 'Equus' caused a sensation because it displayed cruelty to horses; in New York, because it allegedly displayed cruelty to psychiatrists. — Peter Shaffer

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

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

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

The Normal is the good smile in a child's eyes:-alright. It is also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills-like a god. It is the Ordinary made beautiful: it is also the Average made lethal. The Normal is the indispensable, murderous God of Health, and I am his priest. My tools are very delicate. My compassion is honest. I have honestly assisted children in this room. I have talked away terrors and relieved many agonies. But also-beyond question-I have cut from the parts of individuality repugnant to this god, in both his aspects. Parts sacred to rarer and more wonderful gods. And at what length ... Sacrifices to Zeus took at the most, surely, sixty seconds each. Sacrifices to the Normal can take as long as sixty months. — Peter Shaffer

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

God was singing through this little man to all the world. — Peter Shaffer

Art and literature are my surrogate religions. — Peter Shaffer

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

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

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

What was evident was that Mozart was simply transcribing music completely finished in his head. And finished as most music is never finished. Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and structure would fall. I was staring through the cage of those meticulous ink strokes at Absolute Beauty. — Peter Shaffer

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

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

Librarians as a race tend to be tedious. — Peter Shaffer

You have your words, and I have mine. — Peter Shaffer

Have you ever climbed a mountain in full armour? That's what we did, him going first the whole way up a tiny path into the clouds, with drops sheer on both sides into nothing. For hours we crept forward like blind men, the sweat freezing on our faces, lugging skittery leaking horses, and pricked all the time for the ambush that would tip us into death. Each turn of the path it grew colder. The friendly trees of the forest dropped away, and there were only pines. Then they went too, and there just scrubby little bushes standing up in ice. All round us the rocks began to whine the cold. And always above us, or below us, those filthy condor birds, hanging on the air with great tasselled wings ... Four days like that; groaning, not speaking; the breath a blade in our lungs. Four days, slowly, like flies on a wall; limping flies, dying flies, up an endless wall of rock. A tiny army lost in the creases of the moon. — Peter Shaffer

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

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

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

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

All reined up in old language and old assumptions, straining to jump clean-hoofed on to a whole new track of being I only suspect is there. I can't see it, because my educated, average head is being held at the wrong angle. I can't jump because the bit forbids it, and my own basic force - my horsepower, if you like - is too little. — Peter Shaffer

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

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

Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art. — Peter Shaffer

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

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

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

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

When Equus leaves - if he leaves at all - it will be with your intestines in his teeth. — Peter Shaffer

In an ultimate sense I cannot know what I do in this place - yet I do ultimate things. Essentially I cannot know what I do - yet I do essential things. Irreversible, terminal things. I stand in the dark with a pick in my hand, striking at heads! I need - more desperately than my children need me - a way of seeing in the dark. — Peter Shaffer