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.
— Peter Shaffer
In London, 'Equus' caused a sensation because it displayed cruelty to horses; in New York, because it allegedly displayed cruelty to psychiatrists.
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?'
Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish.
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.
My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London.
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 possibly the first film that has music as its leading character.
I think I did have fantasies about being an actor. In fact, I know I did.
But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.
Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.
If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.
There used to be a certain condescension to Mozart. His music was regarded as pleasant. He was a porcelain figure playing a porcelain harpsichord.
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.
Art and literature are my surrogate religions.
The rhetoric is the key to the character. It's the verbal music of the piece.
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.
Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right.
Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.
I was born in Liverpool in England, and I lived there for the first nine years of my life.
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 really believe that studying organization, even in the form of studying detective story organization, is very, very valuable for a playwright, a budding playwright.
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.
Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can't always let people do their own thing.
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.
I was an accomplice in my own frustration.
I think people nowadays do tend to blame their parents for everything.
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.
Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it.
