Words matter. These are the best Peter Shaffer Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by 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.
Art and literature are my surrogate religions.
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.
My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London.
You can’t always let people do their own thing.
Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process.
I think possibly the first film that has music as its leading character.
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’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.
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.
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.
If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.
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.
Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That’s not love, it’s just rubbish.
Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.
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.
I was an accomplice in my own frustration.
Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right.
