Quotes from 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.

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.

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

Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.

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

Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.

Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it.

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.

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.

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

But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.

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

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.

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!'.

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.

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

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

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.

I think I did have fantasies about being an actor. In fact, I know I did.

Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish.

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.

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

Love is the only doorway from the prison of ourselves.

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.