Peter Shaffer Quotes
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I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint.
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All I ever wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing and then made me mute.
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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!
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I was born in Liverpool in England, and I lived there for the first nine years of my life.
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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.
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The best of Mozart's works cannot be even slightly rewritten without diminishment.
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You have your words, and I have mine.
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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.
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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!'.
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If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.
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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.
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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.
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I was an accomplice in my own frustration.
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The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.
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Can you think of anything worse one can do to anybody than take away their worship?
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I think I did have fantasies about being an actor. In fact, I know I did.
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The Normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes - all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults.
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What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve over, does it?
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Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process.
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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.
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Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish.
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My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London.
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A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave.
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Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.
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Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right.
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Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.
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