Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter Shaffer

Creative obsession rarely arrives with a formal invitation; it barges in, rearranges the furniture, and refuses to pay rent. Peter Shaffer is describing that moment when an idea stops being a premise and becomes a presence. The line’s power is its slightly tangled, almost breathless syntax: he can’t even keep the grammar tidy because the experience he’s pointing to is not tidy. Inspiration, in this framing, isn’t a lightning bolt you control. It’s a compulsive afterimage, a phrase or image that keeps looping until you either give it a form or let it corrode you.

Shaffer’s intent is quietly polemical. Against the romantic myth of the author as master planner, he argues for the author as hostage to a “strike” of imagination - an accident that feels like fate only in retrospect. The repetition (“not going to leave you alone, not going to leave alone”) is doing psychological work: it mimics the intrusive thought, the way fixation returns with minor variations, always insisting. It also smuggles in a moral claim about art-making: the writer’s job is not to manufacture importance but to recognize it when it latches on.

Context matters because Shaffer’s best-known plays (Equus, Amadeus) are built on exactly this kind of haunting: a single disturbing question that won’t release its grip. His subjects orbit obsession, reverence, envy, the terrifying intimacy between worship and violence. So the subtext is self-portraiture. He’s telling you how a Shaffer play begins: not with a message, but with a nagging wound that demands a stage.