Peter Shaffer's Quotes

I was an accomplice in my own frustration.

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

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

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.

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

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 possibly the first film that has music as its leading character.

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

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

Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.

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

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

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

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

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

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 really believe that studying organization, even in the form of studying detective story organization, is very, very valuable for a playwright, a budding playwright.

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.

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.