Peter Greenaway Quotes
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'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.'
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The word for smoke should look like smoke - the word for rain should look like rain...
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Later this device of mirror and mirror-carriers will be developed and many changes rung from its possibilities.
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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.
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All my films are somewhat experimental, they are all, each one, taking a certain amount of risk, but there's always the basic assumption that we should be able to appreciate the cinema as much with the mind as we can through emotional empathy. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
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You don't go into the National Gallery of any famous capital city and cry, sob, laugh, fall about on the floor, become very angry - it's a completely different reaction. It's a reaction which is to do with a much more composed sense of regarding an image; it's a reaction with a thought process as opposed to an immediate emotional reaction.
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Galba... a miserable sort of man... bisexual... fancied mature slaves, especially if they had been a little mutilated... all his freed men had no fingers on the left hands... he's dead - died screaming... in a cellar.
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'Imagine you are sucking the little fingers of a lady... or... no, you wouldn't understand that - since you'd never get that close to a lady - who'd want to get that close to you for God's sake?'
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Get the Titanic sailing correctly before you worry about the deck chairs.
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A hand cannot write on itself.
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Everything I try to do wants to be able to push communication through the notion of the visual image.
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Blood: A red substance believed to be capable of supporting life but which in a theatrical drama invariably indicates death.
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Four soiled bedsheets sewn together to make a screen. One for spittle. One for urine. One for semen. One for blood. All for tears.
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I loved Latin - the grammar, the difficult tenses, the history - but for some reason I was very bad at it, shamefully and blushingly bad at it. … In moments of stress the embarrassment of how bad I was at Latin - a subject I loved - really hit me. It was like being laughed at by someone you desperately loved.
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I was continually connected with the whole world and never got any rest. At the moment, I spend only a few hours weekly on the net, that's just better for me.
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If every man is supposed to think of sex once every nine minutes, what on earth does he think of in the other eight?
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I like a lot of glasses about - it highers the tone.
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Atlas, the man who carries the world, becomes the book of the maps of the world. An example of man, or God, into book. Few have that honour.
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The letters Z, O and O dominate the front entrance gates of a capital city zoo. They are made of glass and they tower up two giraffes high. They are the width of one elephant and the colour of bottled blue ink.
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I don't have any particular wish to be polemical or didactic; I don't have a 'message', but what I do thoroughly enjoy are those works of art, not necessarily in the cinema, but in the other arts as well, which have an encyclopaedic world.
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I'm sorry - you know, culture is elitist. Culture has to be elitist: it's about seeing and knowing and about knowledge.
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'You have no right to be jealous of a woman who wants to be more of a woman by watching a man dressed up as a woman.'
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Try this experiment: Pick a famous movie - 'Casablanca,' say - and summarize the plot in one sentence. Is that plot you just described the thing you remember most about it? Doubtful. Narrative is a necessary cement, but it disappears from memory.
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The major sweep of this book's living is too often marred by qualifying. It is hedged about with ifs and buts and if onlys and howevers, excuses for a life that is about to shut its covers for the last time and then crumple into dust in an unseen and never-to-be-remembered library.