Top 40 Peter Shaffer Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Peter Shaffer

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

— Peter Shaffer

3. “I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint.”

— Peter Shaffer

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

— Peter Shaffer

5. “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

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

— Peter Shaffer

7. “All I ever wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing and then made me mute.”

— Peter Shaffer

8. “Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art.”

— Peter Shaffer

9. “The Normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes – all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults.”

— Peter Shaffer

10. “What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve over, does it?”

— Peter Shaffer

11. “Can you think of anything worse one can do to anybody than take away their worship?”

— Peter Shaffer

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

— Peter Shaffer

13. “A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave. It sniffs – it sucks – it strokes its eyes over the whole uncomfortable range. Suddenly one strikes. Why? Moments snap together like magnets, forging a chain of shackles.”

— Peter Shaffer

14. “You can’t always let people do their own thing.”

— Peter Shaffer

15. “That’s what his stare has been saying to me all this time: ‘At least I galloped – when did you?”

— Peter Shaffer

16. “The Devil isn’t made by what Mommy says, or what Daddy says. The Devil is there.”

— Peter Shaffer

17. “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

18. “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...”

— Peter Shaffer

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

— Peter Shaffer

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

— Peter Shaffer

21. “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

22. “You have your words, and I have mine.”

— Peter Shaffer

23. “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!”

— Peter Shaffer

24. “What did I expect of him? Very little, I promise you. One more dented little face. One more adolescent freak. The usual unusual. One great thing about being in the adjustment business: you’re never short of customers.”

— Peter Shaffer

25. “I was an accomplice in my own frustration.”

— Peter Shaffer

26. “God was singing through this little man to all the world.”

— Peter Shaffer

27. “Tell me, before you call us servants, who served whom? And who, I wonder, in your generations, will immortalize you?”

— Peter Shaffer

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

— Peter Shaffer

29. “A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave.”

— Peter Shaffer

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

— Peter Shaffer

31. “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.”

— Peter Shaffer

32. “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

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

— Peter Shaffer

34. “Love is the only doorway from the prison of ourselves.”

— Peter Shaffer

35. “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

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

— Peter Shaffer

37. “The best of Mozart’s works cannot be even slightly rewritten without diminishment.”

— Peter Shaffer

38. “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

39. “Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.”

— Peter Shaffer

40. “I have been listening to the cats in the courtyard. They are all singing Rossini. It is obvious that cats have declined as badly as composers. Domenico Scarlatti owned one which would actually stroll across the keyboard and pick out passable subjects for fugue. But that was a Spanish cat of the Enlightenment. It appreciated counterpoint. Nowadays all cats appreciate are coloratura. Like the rest of the Public.”

— Peter Shaffer