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
husband caring boys
He'll be delivered from madness. What then? He'll feel himself acceptable! What then? Do you think feelings like his can be simply re-attached, like plasters? Stuck on to other objects we select? Look at him! ... My desire might be to make this boy an ardent husband - a caring citizen - a worshipper of abstract and unifying God. My achievement, however, is more likely to make a ghost!
pain unique firsts
Look... 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!'...
mother real kids
Worship isn't destructive, Martin. I know that. I don't. I only know it's the core of his life. What else has he got? He can hardly read. He knows no physics or engineering to make to world real for him. No paintings to show him how others have enjoyed it. No music except television jingles. No history except tales from a desperate mother. No friends. Not one kid to give him a joke, or make him know himself more moderately. He's a modern citizen for whom society doesn't exist.
thinking worship can-do
Can you think of anything worse one can do to anybody than take away their worship?
average track littles
All reined up in old language and old assumptions, straining to jump clean-hoofed on to a whole new track of being I only suspect is there. I can't see it, because my educated, average head is being held at the wrong angle. I can't jump because the bit forbids it, and my own basic force - my horsepower, if you like - is too little.
play flesh process
Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process.
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.