Peter Shaffer Quotes

The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.

Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art.

If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.

I looked on astounded as from his ordinary life he made his art. We were both ordinary men, he and I. Yet from the ordinary he created Legends--and I from Legends created only the ordinary!

A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave.

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

Tell me, before you call us servants, who served whom? And who, I wonder, in your generations, will immortalize you?

There is now, in my mouth, this sharp chain. And it never comes out.

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!

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