Peter Shaffer Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

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

Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.

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

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.

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

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

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!'.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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