Peter Shaffer
Peter Shaffer
Sir Peter Levin Shaffer, CBEwas an English playwright and screenwriter of numerous award-winning plays, several of which have been turned into films...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth15 May 1926
new-york oil london
If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.
thinking facts actors
I think I did have fantasies about being an actor. In fact, I know I did.
fall would-be phrases
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.
two tragedy different
Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right.
people
You can't always let people do their own thing.
girl horse sex
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.
love-is doorways prison
Love is the only doorway from the prison of ourselves.
champion world saint
I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint.
fear writing class
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.
funny taken humor
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.
beautiful children eye
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...
race librarian tedious
Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.
childhood london adolescence
My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London.
couple stupid eye
Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish.