Best 35 quotes of Peter Shaffer on MyQuotes

Peter Shaffer

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    Peter Shaffer

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

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    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, and two china condiment donkeys labelled Sally and Peppy.

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    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.

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    Peter Shaffer

    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.

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    Peter Shaffer

    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.

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    Peter Shaffer

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

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    Peter Shaffer

    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.

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    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!

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    Peter Shaffer

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

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    Peter Shaffer

    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.

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    Peter Shaffer

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

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    Peter Shaffer

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

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    Peter Shaffer

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

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    Peter Shaffer

    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.

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    Peter Shaffer

    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.

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    Peter Shaffer

    Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.

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    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!'.

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    Peter Shaffer

    Love is the only doorway from the prison of ourselves.

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    Peter Shaffer

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

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    Peter Shaffer

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

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    Peter Shaffer

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

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    Peter Shaffer

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

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    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 leathal. The Normal is the indispensable, murderous God of Health.

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    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.

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    Peter Shaffer

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

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    Peter Shaffer

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

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    Peter Shaffer

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

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    Peter Shaffer

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

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    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.

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    Peter Shaffer

    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.

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    Peter Shaffer

    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.

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    Peter Shaffer

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

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    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!

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    Peter Shaffer

    Tell me, before you call us servants, who served whom? And who, I wonder, in your generations, will immortalize you?

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    Peter Shaffer

    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!