Sir Peter Levin Shaffer, CBE (15 May 1926 – 6 June 2016) was an English playwright and screenwriter of numerous award-winning plays, of which several have been turned into films.
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.
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.
A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave.
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.
I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint.
Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.
I think I did have fantasies about being an actor. In fact, I know I did.
Figaro is a bad play. It stirs up hatred between the classes. In France, it has caused nothing but bitterness. My own dear sister,Antoinette, writes me that she is beginning to be frightened of her own people.
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.
What use, after all, is man, if not to teach God His lessons?
I think people nowadays do tend to blame their parents for everything.
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!'.
You have your words, and I have mine.
I was born in Liverpool in England, and I lived there for the first nine years of my life.
I was an accomplice in my own frustration.
Worship isn't destructive, Martin. I know that. I don't. I only know it's the core of his life. What else has he got? He can hardly read. He knows no physics or engineering to make to world real for him. No paintings to show him how others have enjoyed it. No music except television jingles. No history except tales from a desperate mother. No friends. Not one kid to give him a joke, or make him know himself more moderately. He's a modern citizen for whom society doesn't exist.
Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.
Can you think of anything worse one can do to anybody than take away their worship?
Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process.
What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve over, does it?