Peter Greenaway Quotes
-
I never go to the cinema. I can't stand sitting in the dark with strangers - all of us obliged to share the same emotional experiences - it's too intimate. I like to be emotional in private.
-
English culture is highly literary-based.
-
It's so miserable and so easy to keep slamming Titanic - I'll shut up.
-
It's precisely on the Internet that the majority of the writing is terribly bad and uninteresting.
-
Take Mitchel here - no - on second thoughts - don't - because he's a crude little bugger.
-
It serves the purpose of not serving a purpose, surely quite a valid one.
-
'What is your favorite book?'
-
'That's all. Thank you. You may go.'
-
This is the writing of Nagiko Kiyohara no Motosuke Sei Shonagon, and I know you to have blackmailed, violated and humiliated my father. I suspect you also of ruining my husband. You have now committed the greatest crime - you have desecrated the body of my lover. You and I now know that you have lived long enough.
-
I think it is really important to be in some way provocative - either intellectually or viscerally - in the films one makes.
-
Lincoln: A politician who enjoyed the theatre and died because of its convenient darknesses. A celebrated make of car. A town in Lincolnshire, England. A certain colour green.
-
One of my heroes, almost necessarily from what I'm saying, of course, is Borges, who is a supreme master of doing thing - being a data bank - and the beauty of this economy is that he could have written War and Peace in three or four pages; who knows, it might have been a better book.
-
All this could be enough - we would leave an Impressionist painting at this stage - probably much earlier - and leave it possibly with great satisfaction.
-
How can an opera express this complicated question of bedsheets?
-
In a world where we can all be our own filmmakers, the old elites are disappearing and there is no desire to look at somebody else's dream anymore because you can go off and make your own.
-
The predominant colour of the kitchen - its walls, cupboards, floor, shelves - with all the ancillary rooms - pantries, larders, cold stores, and sculleries, is green - Hooker's dark green, leaf-green, emerald, faded turquoise, and eau-de-nile - like the colours of a dark wet jungle.
-
Only cinema narrows its concern down to its content, that is to its story. It should, instead, concern itself with its form, its structure.
-
Counting makes even hideous events bearable as simply more of the same - the counting of wedding-rings, spectacles, teeth and bodies disassociates them from their context - to make the ultimate obscene blasphemy of bureaucratic insensitivity. Engage the mind with numbing recitation to make it empty of reaction.
-
A trembling and some laughter, / a squirt of pee, a spit, / whispers of the heart, / a smell, / the drift to sleep, / pursuit by Gods, / exposure of the bum, / mathematics ...
-
Taupe? What sort of colour is 'taupe'? It sounds like a Malaysian ground sloth encountered once every fifty years by one of the Attenboroughs wearing long socks.
-
I believe that cinema died on the 31 September 1983 when the zapper, or the remote control, was introduced into the living rooms of the world.
-
The moods of the dark night skies are variously represented like soft black velvet, like the shining black of a scarab beetle, like the patina-ed surface of Indian-inked paper, soft blotting-paper soaked in dark blue ink for forty days, like a black cat's fur shining in moonlight...
-
No more. A puff of writing long gone. Is this the child pulling on the flying cloth of its mother's last worn dress?
-
This is a book and a body that is so warm to the touch. My touch.