Peter Shaffer Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Peter Shaffer
We keep saying old people are square. Then when they suddenly aren't—we don't like it!

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

Peter Shaffer
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.

Peter Shaffer
A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave.

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

Peter Shaffer
We really like dowdiness in England. It's absolutely incurable in us, I believe.

Peter Shaffer
On a Mozart opera:
There are simply too many notes.

Peter Shaffer
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!'

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

Peter Shaffer
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 lethal.

Peter Shaffer
I looked on astounded as from his ordinary life he made his art. We were both ordinary men, he and I. Yet from the ordinary he created Legends — and I from Legends created only the ordinary!

Peter Shaffer
All my wife has ever taken from the Mediterranean—from that whole vast intuitive culture—are four bottles of Chianti to make into lamps.

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

Peter Shaffer
Tragedy obviously does not lie in a conflict of Right and Wrong, but in a collision between two different kinds of Right...

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

Peter Shaffer
A singularly dreary street. What I would term Victorian Varicose.

Peter Shaffer
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!

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

Peter Shaffer
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.

Peter Shaffer