Peter Shaffer

“The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.”

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

“I was an accomplice in my own frustration.”

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

“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 m...”

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

“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 t...”

“I really believe that studying organization, even in the form of studying detective story organization, is very, very valuable for a playwright, a budding playwright.”

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

“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.”

“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...”

“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 evac...”

“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.”

“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...”

“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.”

“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.”

“Things rust, you know, like the heart. My cardiologist said, 'It's a pump; use it - that's the sole advice I've got to give you.' It's the same in playwriting. Don't theorise about it. Do it...”

“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...”

“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.”

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