Quotes by Peter Shaffer

“If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.”

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

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

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

“Hes not coming to Boston.”

“When its three oclock in New York, its still 1938 in London.”

“Los Angeles is just New York lying down”

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?

Thats what his stare has been saying to me all this time: At least I galloped - when did you?

If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.

Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art.

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!

Tell me, before you call us servants, who served whom? And who, I wonder, in your generations, will immortalize you?

To go through life and call it yours - your life - you first have to get your own pain. Pain thats unique to you. You cant just dip into the common bin and say Thats enough!

There is now, in my mouth, this sharp chain. And it never comes out.

A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave.

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.

The rhetoric is the key to the character. Its the verbal music of the piece.

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.