Time & Perspective Quote by Peter Shaffer

Time is the invisible stage manager in Shaffer's work: it cues entrances, stretches silences, and turns desire into something tragic precisely because it cannot be held. "Everything we feel is made of Time" isn’t poetic wallpaper; it’s a thesis about how emotion is never raw data. Feeling is duration. Grief is love plus the calendar. Joy is a flare that only reads as joy because it has an ending. By claiming our inner lives are "made of" time, Shaffer shifts emotion from the private, authentic core we like to imagine into a crafted artifact - edited by memory, anticipation, and repetition.

The second sentence sharpens the blade: "All the beauties of life are shaped by it". Beauty here isn’t a timeless ideal; it’s a deadline. A performance is beautiful because it disappears. A face is beautiful because it changes. The subtext is both consoling and cruel: time doesn’t just erode; it composes. It gives form, contour, meaning. Without time, beauty would be static decoration, not a lived experience.

As a playwright, Shaffer is especially attuned to this. Theater is a time-based art that makes you sit inside passing minutes with strangers, watching how longing, envy, faith, or obsession develop beat by beat. In plays like Amadeus and Equus, what destroys characters is not merely what they want, but when they want it - too early, too late, at the wrong tempo for the world around them. The quote reads like a warning to anyone chasing permanence: the only way beauty arrives is on a clock, and the clock always collects.