Peter Shaffer Quotes

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Peter Shaffer

Profession : Playwright

Birth : May 15, 1926

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.

Peter Shaffer

I was born in Liverpool in England, and I lived there for the first nine years of my life.

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.

Peter Shaffer

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 too strong a word.

Peter Shaffer

Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.

Peter Shaffer

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

Peter Shaffer

You can't always let people do their own thing.

Peter Shaffer

I've seen the most remarkable thing. It's in the New York Public Library. They've got the original typescript of 'The Importance of Being Earnest' - all four acts of it.

Peter Shaffer

I discover what I mean as I write. That can be both terrifically exciting and very dangerous, because when you look at your words later, you wonder, 'Did I really mean that, or am I just making verbal patterns?'

Peter Shaffer

Art and literature are my surrogate religions.

Peter Shaffer

I'd be willing to bet that any incursion throughout history in which the invading country has proclaimed it is bringing benefits to the conquered is based on a lie.

Peter Shaffer

A part of me is always envious of people who live in the present and are sustained by a sense of spontaneity. Even dogs have that capacity: they're always wanting to participate in something, and I don't often have that element in me.

Peter Shaffer

In London, 'Equus' caused a sensation because it displayed cruelty to horses; in New York, because it allegedly displayed cruelty to psychiatrists.

Peter Shaffer

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 the Inca civilisation.

Peter Shaffer

There used to be a certain condescension to Mozart. His music was regarded as pleasant. He was a porcelain figure playing a porcelain harpsichord.

Peter Shaffer

Things rust, you know, like the heart. My cardiologist said, 'It's a pump; use it - that's the sole advice I've got to give you.' It's the same in playwriting. Don't theorise about it. Do it.

Peter Shaffer