Peter Shaffer Quotes

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Peter Shaffer

Profession : Playwright

Birth : May 15, 1926

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.

Peter Shaffer

I was an accomplice in my own frustration.

Peter Shaffer

They look so expectant, and then they look so depressed... that was the other great lesson that The Royal Hunt of the Sun taught me, it was the profundity that masked drama can achieve, that of course, the audience were not seeing masks moving at all.

Peter Shaffer

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

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.

Peter Shaffer

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

Peter Shaffer

I was brought up in an Orthodox Jewish household. I don't think I ever had a single discussion with my parents about faith. It was just something gently imposed.

Peter Shaffer

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

Peter Shaffer

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

Peter Shaffer

I think possibly the first film that has music as its leading character.

Peter Shaffer

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.

Peter Shaffer

The rhetoric is the key to the character. It's the verbal music of the piece.

Peter Shaffer

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

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.

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.

Peter Shaffer

But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.

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.

Peter Shaffer

I really believe that studying organization, even in the form of studying detective story organization, is very, very valuable for a playwright, a budding playwright.

Peter Shaffer

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

Peter Shaffer

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

Peter Shaffer