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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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Are these clues? Which ones are important? Which ones are incidental? Which ones are circumstantial?
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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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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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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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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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Isn't that why people keep diaries - to be read by someone else? Why would they keep them otherwise?
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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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On the other hand, I view the whole matter from a cosmic perspective. I don't take a position. I believe that there are no more positions to take, no certainties, no facts. Many people find this confusing about my films; they say I am hiding out behind irony. But from a cosmic viewpoint, it is eternally unimportant whether one lives or not.
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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.
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I obviously irritate people. I obviously antagonise them.