Peter Greenaway Quotes
I think that every artist dreams of renewing the forms which came before, but I think very few can be considered to have achieved that. We are all dwarves standing upon the shoulders of the giants who preceded us, and I think we must never forget that. After all, even iconoclasts only exist with respect to that which they destroy.
Peter Greenaway
Quotes to Explore
'That's all. Thank you. You may go.'
Peter Greenaway
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.
Peter Greenaway
'What is your favorite book?'
Peter Greenaway
Only cinema narrows its concern down to its content, that is to its story. It should, instead, concern itself with its form, its structure.
Peter Greenaway
I think it is really important to be in some way provocative - either intellectually or viscerally - in the films one makes.
Peter Greenaway
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.
Peter Greenaway
All this could be enough - we would leave an Impressionist painting at this stage - probably much earlier - and leave it possibly with great satisfaction.
Peter Greenaway
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.
Peter Greenaway
How can an opera express this complicated question of bedsheets?
Peter Greenaway
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.
Peter Greenaway
No more. A puff of writing long gone. Is this the child pulling on the flying cloth of its mother's last worn dress?
Peter Greenaway
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.
Peter Greenaway
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.
Peter Greenaway
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.
Peter Greenaway
Look, it was an accident. Five thousand accidents happen every day - bizarre, tragic, farcical... they're Acts of God fit only to amaze the survivors and irritate the Insurance Company...
Peter Greenaway
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 ...
Peter Greenaway
I sit here for hours. It's like sitting amongst lighthouses, each lighthouse giving you a bearing on lost spaces of time...
Peter Greenaway
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...
Peter Greenaway
