"You never quite know what's going to strike your imagination, or something that won't going to leave you alone, not going to leave alone, and this was one for me"
About this Quote
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.
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.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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