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
The best of Mozart's works cannot be even slightly rewritten without diminishment.
years nine firsts
I was born in Liverpool in England, and I lived there for the first nine years of my life.
passion doctors medical
Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.
years land america
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.
beauty-of-life made feels
Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it.
thinking people parent
I think people nowadays do tend to blame their parents for everything.
god longing mute
All I ever wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing and then made me mute.
moving book writing
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.
eye heart grieving
What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve over, does it?
children thinking purpose
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.
life people inspire
The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.
fixated followers oblivious
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.
But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.
both discover exciting verbal
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?'