15 Quotes & Sayings By Peter Shaffer

Peter Shaffer is an internationally renowned playwright, theatre director and actor. His plays include Equus, Amadeus, and last year's revival of The Deep Blue Sea. He has been awarded an OBE from the Queen for his services to drama and received the Writers' Award from the Society of London Playwrights in recognition of his contribution to British theatre.

1
The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you. Peter Shaffer
What use, after all, is man, if not to teach...
2
What use, after all, is man, if not to teach God His lessons? Peter Shaffer
That's what his stare has been saying to me all...
3
That's what his stare has been saying to me all this time: 'At least I galloped - when did you? Peter Shaffer
4
If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting. Peter Shaffer
5
Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art. Peter Shaffer
6
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! Peter Shaffer
7
Tell me, before you call us servants, who served whom? And who, I wonder, in your generations, will immortalize you? Peter Shaffer
8
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! Peter Shaffer
9
There is now, in my mouth, this sharp chain. And it never comes out. Peter Shaffer
10
A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave. Peter Shaffer
11
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. Peter Shaffer
12
The rhetoric is the key to the character. It's the verbal music of the piece. Peter Shaffer
13
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. Peter Shaffer
14
Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created. Peter Shaffer