Peter Shaffer Quotes

All I've ever wanted is to be normal.

Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization.

Anybody who's away from what's normal is just kind of pushed aside as, 'Oh, he's crazy.' But in reality, this world is crazy. It's just chaos everywhere. It's really hard to be part of this world, because it's very possessed. And very egocentric.

The whole system of society tells you what to do.

The thing that really matters to me is well-being and happiness. Maybe it comes from knowing people who have tortured themselves trying to meet these strangely narrow and rigorous definitions of what our culture thinks is beautiful.

I don't know if I'm 'normal.'

In today's society, a lot of males think you have to be strong all the time, and you're not allowed to show weakness. That's just so false.

We're the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. Everybody's afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else.

Humanity i love you because you are perpetually putting the secret of life in your pants and forgetting it's there and sitting down on it and because you are forever making poems in the lap of death Humanity i hate you

Women are strong and fragile. Women are beautiful and ugly. We are soft spoken and loud, all at once.

I say things that contradict each other, that are in real tension with each other, that compose me, that make me live, and that will make me die.

One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.

I was beginning to understand something about normality. Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself. But people-and especially doctors- had doubts about normality. They weren't sure normality was up the job. And so they felt inclined to give it a boost.

Everyone wanted to be rich and beautiful, but the truly rich and beautiful had to pretend they were just the same as everyone else.

Is it you and I who are crazy, or is it everybody else?

Hard work never killed a man. Men die of boredom, psychological conflict, and disease. They do not die of hard work.

I feel like our generation is just so obsessed with the idea of perfection and we don't need to be.

Which path do you intend to take, Nell?' said the Constable, sounding very interested. 'Conformity or rebellion?' Neither one. Both ways are simple-minded - they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity.

Every decent man of our age must be a coward and a slave. That is his normal condition. Of that I am firmly persuaded. He is made and constructed to that very end. And not only at the present time owing to some casual circumstance, but always, at all times, a decent man is bound to be a coward and a slave.

Society demands conformity at the expense of individual liberty. Let us be for once a non conformist to be fully alive.

Perhaps a normal man is supposed to be stupid-how do we know? Perhaps it's even very beautiful.

Living is death; dying is life. We are not what we appear to be. On this side of the grave we are exiles, on that citizens; on this side orphans, on that children.

Humanity can be divided into madmen and cowards. My personal tragedy is in being born into a world where sanity is held to be a character flaw.

Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time - beautiful?