Quotes from 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!

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.

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

Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art.

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

I cannot accept merely...I do not do anything merely.

God was singing through this little man to all the world.

Do you know what it's like for two people to live in the same house as if they were in different parts of the world?

The Normal is the good smile in a child's eyes - all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults.

What did I expect of him? Very little, I promise you. One more dented little face. One more adolescent freak. The usual unusual. One great thing about being in the adjustment business: you're never short of customers.

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

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

When Equus leaves - if he leaves at all - it will be with your intestines in his teeth.

The Devil isn't made by what Mommy says, or what Daddy says. The Devil is there.

Oh, you monster!No one exists but you, do they? You and your music!

That's what his stare has been saying to me all this time: 'At least I galloped - when did you?

Emperor Joseph II: My dear young man, don't take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It's quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that's all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect. Mozart: Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?

I'll give him the good Normal world where we're tethered beside them - blinking our nights away in a non-stop drench of cathode-ray over our shrivelling heads!

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.

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.

Art and literature are my surrogate religions.

All I ever wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing and then made me mute.

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.

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.