Peter Shaffer

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

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

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

What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve over, does it?

Look... 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!'...

You have your words, and I have mine.

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!

He'll be delivered from madness. What then? He'll feel himself acceptable! What then? Do you think feelings like his can be simply re-attached, like plasters? Stuck on to other objects we select? Look at him! ... My desire might be to make this boy an ardent husband - a caring citizen - a worshipper of abstract and unifying God. My achievement, however, is more likely to make a ghost!