Peter Shaffer quotes

Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right. (Peter Shaffer)
If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting. View quote
Peter Shaffer
Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process. View quote
Peter Shaffer
Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Peter Shaffer
The trouble is if you don't spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you. View quote
Peter Shaffer
The men climb the Andes. View quote
Peter Shaffer
I was an accomplice in my own frustration. View quote
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. View quote
Peter Shaffer
I think people nowadays do tend to blame their parents for everything. (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. View quote
Peter Shaffer
I was born in Liverpool in England, and I lived there for the first nine years of my life. View quote
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. View quote
Peter Shaffer
I think I did have fantasies about being an actor. In fact, I know I did. View quote
Peter Shaffer
Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Peter Shaffer
Librarians as a race tend to be tedious. View quote
Peter Shaffer
My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London. View quote
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)
Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish. View quote
Peter Shaffer
You can't always let people do their own thing. View quote
Peter Shaffer
In London, 'Equus' caused a sensation because it displayed cruelty to horses; in New York, because it allegedly displayed cruelty to psychiatrists. View quote
Peter Shaffer
But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own. View quote
Peter Shaffer