Quotes by Peter Shaffer

About Peter Shaffer:

Sir Peter Levin Shaffer is an English playwright and screenwriter of numerous award-winning plays, several of which have been filmed.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

There is now, in my mouth, this sharp chain. And it never comes out.

Peter Shaffer

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

Peter Shaffer

The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.

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.

Peter Shaffer

Art and literature are my surrogate religions.

Peter Shaffer

Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art.

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!

Peter Shaffer

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

Peter Shaffer

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

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

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

Peter Shaffer

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

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 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

I was an accomplice in my own frustration.

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

Author Bio

  • NamePeter Shaffer
  • DescriptionEnglish playwright and screenwriter
  • BornMay 15, 1926
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionScreenwriter; Playwright; Writer
  • WorksBlack Comedy