Zitat des Tages von Peter Shaffer:
I was an accomplice in my own frustration.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London.
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.
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.
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?'
But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.
Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it.
I think possibly the first film that has music as its leading character.
If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.
Art and literature are my surrogate religions.
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 rhetoric is the key to the character. It's the verbal music of the piece.
Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.
Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish.
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.
I think I did have fantasies about being an actor. In fact, I know I did.
You can't always let people do their own thing.
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.
Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.