Peter Shaffer Quotes

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

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

The Normal is the good smile in a child's eyes- all right. 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 leathal. The Normal is the indispensable, murderous God of Health.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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!'.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

You have your words, and I have mine.

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

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

I was an accomplice in my own frustration.

Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art.

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!

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