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.
A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave.
Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process.
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.
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.
If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.
All my wife has ever taken from the Mediterranean - from that whole vast intuitive culture - are four bottles of Chianti to make into lamps, and two china condiment donkeys labelled Sally and Peppy.
The best of Mozart's works cannot be even slightly rewritten without diminishment.
Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art.
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.
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.
I was born in Liverpool in England, and I lived there for the first nine years of my life.
Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.
Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it.