Peter Shaffer Quotes

Everyone around me is so strict about keeping me grounded.

I am not aspiring to be a senior bureaucrat. It would limit my freedom.

Let's find out what everyone is doing, And then stop everyone from doing it.

I can't imagine people telling me what to do - I just can't imagine it.

The important thing for me when I look at characters is to consider the kind of constraints placed upon them. Now, me personally, I don't like to have a lot of constraints placed upon me.

They defined what was private and what was public and they would move it whenever they wished.

We don't really like rules. We think, in some way, they are an infringement of liberty.

The reason that we have rules is so that sometimes they can be suspended.

There were a lot of stop signs in my life... People telling you what to do, when to do it, and so on.

I'm not a big fan of people telling each other what to do, I'll say that.

If my life choices had to be predicated based on what was expected of me from a community on either side, that's going to make me feel really straitjacketed, and I don't want to feel that.

I don't like rules.

My parents never let me have everything.

I have people telling me what I can and can't do, what music I can and can't make.

I value my own independence so highly that I can fancy no degradation greater than that of having another man perpetually directing and advising and lecturing me, or even planning too closely in any way about my actions. He might be the wisest of men, or the most powerful - I should equally rebel and resent his interference.

It is mediocrity which makes laws and sets mantraps and spring-guns in the realm of free song, saying thus far shalt thou go and no further.

Don't tell me what to do, don't tell me what to say. And please, when I go out with you, don't put me on display.

People only see permissiveness in the sense of having more.

I will not allow people to impose rules on me that don't make sense to me. And I live and work very much outside the literary world and the literary system. What they think and what they believe and what their rules are mean nothing to me.

It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to, and then to learn something of the value of those limits.

A lot of people believe that if everybody just did what they were told - obeyed - everything would be fine. But that's not what life is all about. That's not real. It's never going to happen.

The permissiveness of society must be balanced with authoritativeness.

Limits are very important.

I didn't want people to decide what I was going to wear and what I was going to look like and how I should behave.

The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things.