Peter Greenaway Quotes

If you think about it, most cinema is built along 19th-century models. You would hardly think that the cinema had discovered James Joyce sometimes.

Peter Greenaway

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Quotes to Explore

• 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.

  

  Peter Greenaway
  • Dark
  • Emotional

• English culture is highly literary-based.

  

  Peter Greenaway
  • Culture
  • English

• It's precisely on the Internet that the majority of the writing is terribly bad and uninteresting.

  

  Peter Greenaway
  • Writing
  • Bad

• It's so miserable and so easy to keep slamming Titanic - I'll shut up.

  

  Peter Greenaway
  • Up
  • Titanic

• Take Mitchel here - no - on second thoughts - don't - because he's a crude little bugger.

  

  Peter Greenaway
  • Thoughts

• It serves the purpose of not serving a purpose, surely quite a valid one.

  

  Peter Greenaway
  • Purpose

• 'What is your favorite book?'

  

  Peter Greenaway
  • Book

• 'That's all. Thank you. You may go.'

  

  Peter Greenaway
  • May

• 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
  • Long
  • Writing
  • Father

• I think it is really important to be in some way provocative - either intellectually or viscerally - in the films one makes.

  

  Peter Greenaway
  • Important

• 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
  • Car
  • Theatre
  • 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.

  

  Peter Greenaway
  • Book
  • War
  • Peace

• 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
  • Great
  • Painting

• How can an opera express this complicated question of bedsheets?

  

  Peter Greenaway
  • Question

• 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

• 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
  • World
  • Dream
  • Desire

• 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
  • Dark
  • Cold
  • Green

• 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
  • Mind
  • Wedding

• 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
  • Heart
  • Sleep
  • Laughter

• 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
  • Long
  • Writing
  • Mother

• 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.

  

  Peter Greenaway
  • Long

• 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
  • Night
  • Black
  • Dark

• 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
  • World
  • Believe
  • Control

• This is a book and a body that is so warm to the touch. My touch.

  

  Peter Greenaway
  • Book