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 of course, the audience were not seeing masks moving at all.

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Peter Shaffer's quotes

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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.

Peter Shaffer

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 moment is the play.

Peter Shaffer

It's an extraordinary thing about Mozart is that you never tire of him... he never bores me, and he doesn't... not only bore me, that's too strong a word.

Peter Shaffer

I was born in Liverpool in England, and I lived there for the first nine years of my life.

Peter Shaffer

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

Peter Shaffer

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

Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.

Peter Shaffer

I think people nowadays do tend to blame their parents for everything.

Peter Shaffer

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

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 of course, the audience were not seeing masks moving at all.

Peter Shaffer

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

Peter Shaffer

You can't always let people do their own thing.

Peter Shaffer

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

Peter Shaffer

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.

Peter Shaffer

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

Peter Shaffer

And in fact, I think one of the best guides to telling you who you are, and I think children use it all the time for this purpose, is fantasy.

Peter Shaffer

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.

Peter Shaffer

I think I did have fantasies about being an actor. In fact, I know I did.

Peter Shaffer

You never quite know what's going to strike your imagination, or something that won't going to leave you alone, not going to leave alone, and this was one for me.

Peter Shaffer

Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right.

Peter Shaffer

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

Peter Shaffer

I think possibly the first film that has music as its leading character.

Peter Shaffer

My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London.

Peter Shaffer

Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish.

Peter Shaffer

I was an accomplice in my own frustration.

Peter Shaffer

Art and literature are my surrogate religions.

Peter Shaffer

I discover what I mean as I write. That can be both terrifically exciting and very dangerous, because when you look at your words later, you wonder, 'Did I really mean that, or am I just making verbal patterns?'

Peter Shaffer

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

Peter Shaffer

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.

Peter Shaffer

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.

Peter Shaffer

The rhetoric is the key to the character. It's the verbal music of the piece.

Peter Shaffer

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.

Peter Shaffer

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

Peter Shaffer

I did radio back in the era when we did radio drama.

Martin Milner

By obtaining a sense of its place in the unfolding drama of life, set in an ecological theatre, so we can understand why it has become one of the leading players.

Simon Conway Morris

I had an amazing experience working with great people. I had a great family, a typical family with drama in certain areas, and that's pretty much everywhere in everyone's life.

Tina Yothers

Comedy is so hard; it's so much harder than drama. The pacing of it, the energy of it.

Josh Lucas

I was always a drama queen. I remember playing in the kitchen, trying to get my mom to think I was dead and call the police. When she didn't, I would cry. I was always theatrical. I don't think any of my relatives are surprised.

Amy Lee

You have to go to the ultimate situation in drama.

Edward Bond

Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.

John Drinkwater

The drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion: what is left is theater.

Robertson Davies

I think the American West really attracts me because it's romantic. The desert, the empty space, the drama.

Ang Lee

For me, football is just a game, not a drama.

Michel Patini

The more commercial work that is happening, the more people are operating cameras and are setting up studio lights, the greater the opportunity for drama production to happen.

Ann Macbeth

I'm doing music, and we both want to do some drama.

Kel Mitchell

Culture clash is terrific drama.

Ken Follett

I want to do drama, light comedy, the whole range.

Bobby Darin

We respond to a drama to that extent to which it corresponds to our dreamlife.

David Mamet