A biography for Peter Shafferhasn’t been written yet.
“I think possibly the first film that has music as its leading character.”
“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.”
“I've seen the most remarkable thing. It's in the New York Public Library. They've got the original typescript of 'The Importance of Being Earnest' - all four acts of it.”
“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.”
“Tell me, before you call us servants, who served whom? And who, I wonder, in your generations, will immortalize you?”
“Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.”
“I think people nowadays do tend to blame their parents for everything.”
“If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.”
“Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process.”
“But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.”
“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.”
“The rhetoric is the key to the character. It's the verbal music of the piece.”
“I was brought up in an Orthodox Jewish household. I don't think I ever had a single discussion with my parents about faith. It was just something gently imposed.”
“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.”
“I think I did have fantasies about being an actor. In fact, I know I did.”
“I was born in Liverpool in England, and I lived there for the first nine years of my life.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it.”