Quotes by Peter Shaffer

“That's what his stare has been saying to me all this time: 'At least I galloped - when did you?”

“The trouble is if you dont spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.”

“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!”

“What use, after all, is man, if not to teach God His lessons?”

“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?”

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

“The rhetoric is the key to the character. It's 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 eve...”

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

“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 ...”

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

“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?”

“That's what his stare has been saying to me all this time: 'At least I galloped - when did you?”

“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!”