Peter Shaffer quotes

Peter Shaffer was an English playwright renowned for his psychologically complex and dramatically innovative works. His plays, such as "Equus" and "Amadeus," have garnered critical acclaim and numerous awards. He remains celebrated for his profound exploration of human nature and creativity. Here are 31 of his 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.

Peter Shaffer

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

Peter Shaffer

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

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.

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.

Peter Shaffer

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

Peter Shaffer

The men climb the Andes.

Peter Shaffer

I was an accomplice in my own frustration.

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.

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.

Peter Shaffer

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

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.

Peter Shaffer

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

Peter Shaffer

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

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.

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.

Peter Shaffer

Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.

Peter Shaffer

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

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.

Peter Shaffer

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

Peter Shaffer

In London, 'Equus' caused a sensation because it displayed cruelty to horses; in New York, because it allegedly displayed cruelty to psychiatrists.

Peter Shaffer

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

Peter Shaffer

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Peter Shaffer

Peter Shaffer - Image

Occupation: English Playwright
Born: May 15, 1926
Died: June 6, 2016
Quotes count: 31
Wikipedia: Peter Shaffer

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