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.
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!'.
The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.
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.
Love is the only doorway from the prison of ourselves.
All I ever wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing and then made me mute.
Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right.
What use, after all, is man, if not to teach God His lessons?
The devil isn't made by what Mommy says or what Daddy says. The devil is there.
I was born in Liverpool in England, and I lived there for the first nine years of my life.
I think people nowadays do tend to blame their parents for everything.
The best of Mozart's works cannot be even slightly rewritten without diminishment.
What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve over, does it?
You can't always let people do their own thing.