Peter Shaffer Quotes

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

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.

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

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

Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art.

I was an accomplice in my own frustration.

Love is the only doorway from the prison of ourselves.

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.

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

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

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!

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

You have your words, and I have mine.

The Normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes - all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults.

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. 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.

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.

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.