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

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

Peter Shaffer

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

Peter Shaffer

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

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

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

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

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'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

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

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

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

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'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

We... our war began September the 3rd 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany, and thereafter the great state of danger in England at that time, with the bombings, necessitated the evacuation of children.

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Shaffer

Author Bio

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