Peter Shaffer

“There used to be a certain condescension to Mozart. His music was regarded as pleasant. He was a porcelain figure playing a porcelain harpsichord.”

“The conquistadors and their followers were very rough people, and they were fixated on gold and silver. They were oblivious to the astonishing achievements of the Inca civilisation.”

“That's what his stare has been saying to me all this time: 'At least I galloped - when did you?”

“A part of me is always envious of people who live in the present and are sustained by a sense of spontaneity. Even dogs have that capacity: they're always wanting to participate in something, and I don't often have that element in me.”

“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.”

“In London, 'Equus' caused a sensation because it displayed cruelty to horses; in New York, because it allegedly displayed cruelty to psychiatrists.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“I'd be willing to bet that any incursion throughout history in which the invading country has proclaimed it is bringing benefits to the conquered is based on a lie.”

“I discover what I mean as I write. That can be both terrifically exciting and very dangerous, because when you look at your words later, you wonder, 'Did I really mean that, or am I just making verbal patterns?'”

“We... our war began September the 3rd 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany, and thereafter the great state of danger in England at that time, with the bombings, necessitated the evacuation of children.”

“Things rust, you know, like the heart. My cardiologist said, 'It's a pump; use it - that's the sole advice I've got to give you.' It's the same in playwriting. Don't theorise about it. Do it.”

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

“I was an accomplice in my own frustration.”

“Art and literature are my surrogate religions.”

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

“Our function as playwrights to some extent is to make audiences see with their ears, because films make us see with our eyes much better.”