Peter Shaffer Quotes

These days, my subjects are murder and mayhem and other terrible things that happen to people - things that are even worse than cutting yourself shaving. And these are not the sorts of things you feel the need to experience before you write about them.

My research for 'Adam' affected me profoundly, particularly the research into evil's underbelly. We tend not to think about evil until it pokes its head out of the air about us and then it tends to scare us silly. As well it should.

I have a hard time watching people getting punched on screen; I have to close my eyes a lot.

As crime writers, we put these characters, year after year, book after book, through the most horrendous trauma, dealing with grief and death and loss and violence. We can't pretend that these things don't affect these characters; they have to. If they don't, then you're essentially writing cartoons.

'The Reader' is about a young man's experience of falling in love with somebody who, it turns out, made some choices that were unavoidable in her life that resulted in horrific crimes against humanity.

Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can't face it head-on.

At fourteen, my sister sailed away from me into a place I’d never been. In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows.

Do ya remember the first time you had sex? I do, and boy, was I scared! I was alone!

My arms are up to the elbows in blood. That is the most terrible thing that lies in my soul.

Someone told me you start liking sex when you hit 30--but we'll see.

When I took my clothes off in Blue Velvet, I wanted to convey the brutality of sex abuse. I wanted to look like a quartered cow hanging in a butcher shop as well as disturbingly appealing.

When you're dealing with killing people and things that are upsetting, that can be a delicate place to occupy yourself for a day.

Adam lay perfectly still, little groans escaping from his lips. I looked at the bow, looked at my hands, looked at Adam's face and felt this surge of love, lust, and an unfamiliar feeling of power.

trust me, Anita, if you get dead, especially if he blames himself in any way, he will be a force of destruction looking for a place to be aimed. And he's blamed himself for introducing you to Olaf here from the get-go. If Olaf did to you what he's done to some of his other victims, Edward would drown the world in blood to erase those images.

Sex, like art, can unsettle a soul, can grind a heart in a mortar. Sex, like literature, can sneak the other within one's wall, even if only for a moment, a moment before one immures oneself again.

It took a lot of water to down just that f-king bat's head, let me tell you. It's still stuck in my f-king throat, after all these years. People all over the world say, 'You're the guy who kills creatures? You still do it? You do it every night?' It happened f-king once, for Christ's sake.

But this word will I say to my enemies: What is all manslaughter in comparison with what you have done to me!

As for everyone else, unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell.

When I go see an R-rated horror movie, I want lots of violence. I want nudity. I want sex and violence mixed together. What's wrong with that? Am I the only one? I don't think so.

It was the day my grandmother exploded.

Man down is a song about a girl who has committed a murder that she regrets and is completely remorseful about.

Down the well," Angela repeated, and had to go sit down and hold on to her letter opener. It was in the shape of a dagger. Angela said holding it soothed her; seeing Angela hold it did not soothe Kami.

We live in a world where in the movie you can disembowel someone in a youth hostel in Romania, but you can't show people having sex. I think it's weird.

And what can I tell you, my brother, my killer, what can I possibly say? I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you, I'm glad you stood in my way

Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?