Explore Quotes by Peter Shaffer

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

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

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

I was an accomplice in my own frustration.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art.

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.