40+ Peter Shaffer Quotes On Religion, Education And Equus

Peter Shaffer was an English playwright best known for his Tony Award-winning play Equus. He was born in Liverpool in 1926 and wrote several plays, including Amadeus and Black Comedy. He was knighted in 2001 for his contribution to drama. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Peter Shaffer on religion, education, life.

Top 10 Peter Shaffer Quotes

1. If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.
2. The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.
3. 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.
4. I was an accomplice in my own frustration.
5. Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right.
6. Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process.
7. Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it.
8. Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish.
9. 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.
10. My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London.

Peter Shaffer Short Quotes

• I think people nowadays do tend to blame their parents for everything.
• Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.
• Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.
• I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint.
• I was born in Liverpool in England, and I lived there for the first nine years of my life.
• I think I did have fantasies about being an actor. In fact, I know I did.
• What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve over, does it?
• You have your words, and I have mine.
• Can you think of anything worse one can do to anybody than take away their worship?
• The best of Mozart's works cannot be even slightly rewritten without diminishment.

Peter Shaffer Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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. — 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. — 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. — Peter Shaffer

All I ever wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing and then made me mute. — 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. — 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!'. — Peter Shaffer

Love is the only doorway from the prison of ourselves. — 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

The devil isn't made by what Mommy says or what Daddy says. The devil is there. — 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! — Peter Shaffer

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

What use, after all, is man, if not to teach God His lessons? — 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. — Peter Shaffer

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

Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art. — Peter Shaffer

Life Lessons by Peter Shaffer

1. Peter Shaffer's plays often explore the complexities of human relationships, emphasizing the importance of understanding and communication.
2. Shaffer's work also emphasizes the importance of self-reflection and understanding one's own motivations and desires.
3. His plays also demonstrate the power of art to inspire and challenge us to think differently about the world and our place in it.