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
fear writing class
Figaro is a bad play. It stirs up hatred between the classes. In France, it has caused nothing but bitterness. My own dear sister,Antoinette, writes me that she is beginning to be frightened of her own people.
funny taken humor
All my wife has ever taken from the Mediterranean - from that whole vast intuitive culture - are four bottles of Chianti to make into lamps, and two china condiment donkeys labelled Sally and Peppy.
beautiful children eye
The Normal is the good smile in a child's eyes- all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills- like a God. It is the Ordinary made beautiful; it is also the Average made leathal. The Normal is the indispensable, murderous God of Health...
race librarian tedious
Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.
childhood london adolescence
My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London.
couple stupid eye
Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish.
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.