Peter Greenaway Quotes
-
'Raw sex is the last thing you are going to encounter in a Jane Austen woman.'
-
Isn't that why people keep diaries - to be read by someone else? Why would they keep them otherwise?
-
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.
-
No Albert - it's not God - it's Michael. My lover. You vowed you would kill him - and you did. And you vowed you would eat him. Now eat him.
-
'I once saw a film where the main character didn't speak for the first half hour.'
-
Religion is there to say, 'Hey, you don't have to worry - there's an afterlife.'
-
Jerome was dyslexic until he was twelve, before it became fashionable. And he broke every pair of glasses I bought him. He hated wearing glasses. He was good at breaking things. Especially relationships. Just like his father.
-
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.
-
Investigation is never complete.
-
That comes from most people having an American film model in their heads which is nothing but a total illusionary masturbatory massage.
-
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.
-
The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.
-
If you were not to be its victim, this book and body would amuse you with its arrogance. It would make you laugh. Because you were not its victim, you could feel no pain of betrayal.
-
All this narcissism is rather boring, isn't it?
-
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.
-
Most people are visually illiterate. Most people don't understand images: they don't understand how to interpret them or how to manufacture them.
-
Dawns and sunsets. The Magic Hour - when the sun and the moon can be in the sky at the same time - a magic and disturbing occurrence for a child. And for an adult.
-
Whether you're Godard or Almodovar or Scorsese, it's text, text, text. Everything begins with the text, and this is a source of great anguish to me. So please let cinema get on with doing what it does best, which is expressing ideas in visual terms.
-
Imagine a world where nothing is stable. In the West, we have three moving elements - Air, Fire, Water - but at least we can depend on the fourth.
-
'A long white dress that starts under the breast and travels on interminably down - so their legs are entirely mysterious - they could have one leg or two inside that dress... A Jane Austen woman could be incredibly passionate inside that dress.'
-
His writing - in so many languages - made me a sign-post pointing east, west, north and south. I had shoes in German, stockings in French, gloves in Hebrew, a hat with a veil in Italian. He only kept me naked where I was most accustomed to wearing clothes.
-
I married. I became a wife. I acquired a husband. I had a ceremonial wedding in style. Whichever way you say it - it was bound to end badly.
-
Orchestra: Anagram of carthorse.
-
This book and I have become indivisible. I have placed my feet on this book's last pages, confident of standing so much higher in the world than I ever stood before.