Peter Shaffer Quotes

45 quotes in 653 categories

• Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right.
• You can't always let people do their own thing.
• 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…
• Love is the only doorway from the prison of ourselves.
• I was an accomplice in my own frustration.
• Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.
• If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.
• Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process.
• The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.
• 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…
• Can you think of anything worse one can do to anybody than take away their worship?
• 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…
• Look... to go through life and call it yours - your life - you first have to get your own pain. Pain that's unique to…
• 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?…
• You have your words, and I have mine.
• Our function as playwrights to some extent is to make audiences see with their ears, because films make us see with our eyes much better.
• Art and literature are my surrogate religions.
• The conquistadors and their followers were very rough people, and they were fixated on gold and silver. They were oblivious to the astonishing achievements of…
• There used to be a certain condescension to Mozart. His music was regarded as pleasant. He was a porcelain figure playing a porcelain harpsichord.
• But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.

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