Peter Greenaway Quotes
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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...
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I sit here for hours. It's like sitting amongst lighthouses, each lighthouse giving you a bearing on lost spaces of time...
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Cinema, which demands suspension of disbelief, is an increasingly naive proposition.
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All the material is fictional and develops its own eight and a half private, coelesced journeys, where, perhaps not unexpectedly, the females can run faster than the men and trade their freedoms by exhausting the male sexual fantasies and replacing them by some of their own.
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May I keep this book forever. May this book and this body outlast my love. May this book and this body love me as I love its length, its breadth, its thickness, its text, its skin, its letters, its punctuation, its quiet and its noisy pages.
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'Georgie doesn't like babies do you Georgie? Some days, Georgie, I think you behave like a bloke.'
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Book #10: A Book of Travellers' Tales. As it hits the water its pages detach themselves from the covers, which sink... and the pages form themselves into small paper boats that float away on the tide.
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I have always had severe problems with Austrians. … Musical, churchy, uptight... nice legs... hypocritical... authoritarian... always insist their dustbins are very clean.
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Are animals like car-crashes - Acts of God or mere Accidents - bizarre, tragic, farcical, plotted nowadays into a scenario by an ingenious storyteller, Mr C Darwin?
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I think my films are always quite self-reflexive and always question 'why am I doing this, is this the right way to do it, what is cinema for, does it have a purpose?'
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The game Flights of Fancy or Reverse Strip Jump is played from as high a jumping-point as a competitor will dare. After each successful jump, the competitor is allowing to put on an article of clothing. Thirteen jumps is normally more than enough to see a competitor fully dressed for the day.
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I think that films or indeed any art work should be made in a way that they are infinitely viewable; so that you could go back to it time and time again, not necessarily immediately but over a space of time, and see new things in it, or new ways of looking at it.
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Smut is a target for reconstructed cricketing accidents - he is the Cricket Saint Sebastian.
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Perhaps, sadly, in the end, cinema is only a translator's art, and you know what they say about translators: traitors all.
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Are these clues? Which ones are important? Which ones are incidental? Which ones are circumstantial?
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I don't want to be a film-maker. I think painting is far more exciting and profound.
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'Raw sex is the last thing you are going to encounter in a Jane Austen woman.'
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I don't believe in the deplorable notion of realism in the cinema: you can over-reach it, and it becomes as false as convention.
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The moistened thumb of the expectant reader has not yet marked the soft tissues of this lean clean smiling volume. Spread me, and break me open, for pleasure.
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Isn't that why people keep diaries - to be read by someone else? Why would they keep them otherwise?
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A thrown-stone trajectory is a good metaphor for so many phenomena: the curve of an event, any event; the curve of a life, any life; the curve of a hypothesis; the curve experienced in the manufacture of a work of art; the curve of interest experienced in the manufacture of a catalogue.
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Book #8: The Vesalius Anatomy of Birth. As it hits the water, it screams and spurts blood like a pierced heart - as it sinks, there is a suggestion of entrails.
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It's a movie that bewilders some viewers and mesmerizes others. A man I met while we were exercising our dogs told me it was the greatest film he had ever seen, and one of my editors claims it's the closest any movie has ever come to photographing the inside of his mind.
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That comes from most people having an American film model in their heads which is nothing but a total illusionary masturbatory massage.