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

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

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

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

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

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

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


I was an accomplice in my own frustration.
Peter Shaffer

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

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

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

Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.
Peter Shaffer

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

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

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