Peter Shaffer Quotes

45 quotes in 653 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve over, does it?
• 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.
• The Devil isn’t made by what Mommy says, or what Daddy says. The Devil is there.
• What use, after all, is man, if not to teach God His lessons?
• A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• I think I did have fantasies about being an actor. In fact, I know I did.
• 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…
• 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.
• Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish.
• My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London.
• I think people nowadays do tend to blame their parents for everything.
• Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it.
• Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.

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