Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter Shaffer

Shaffer can barely get the compliment out without tripping over his own scruples, and that stumble is the point. “Extraordinary” is easy praise; “you never tire of him” is bolder, almost suspicious in a culture that expects even masterpieces to become homework. Then Shaffer catches himself: “he never bores me, and he doesn’t... not only bore me, that’s too strong a word.” The ellipses record an intelligent man negotiating the limits of language in real time, resisting the crude, consumer-ish metric of “boredom” as if it cheapens what Mozart actually does.

The intent is to describe a peculiar kind of artistic permanence: Mozart isn’t just good, he’s inexhaustible. Shaffer’s subtext is that most art, even admired art, eventually reveals its seams. You learn the tricks, anticipate the turns, feel the repetition. Mozart, for Shaffer, keeps eluding that flattening familiarity. The music doesn’t merely withstand repetition; it changes under your attention, making the listener feel like the variable.

Context matters: Shaffer is the playwright of Amadeus, a work built on the scandalous contrast between “divine” music and very human pettiness. His half-retraction about boredom echoes Salieri’s torment: the real insult isn’t that Mozart is entertaining, it’s that his work feels mysteriously alive - beyond moral improvement, beyond rational explanation, beyond the tired vocabulary we use to rank art. Shaffer’s hesitation becomes a small dramatization of awe: when the subject is Mozart, even certainty sounds inadequate.