Peter Greenaway Quotes
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Get the Titanic sailing correctly before you worry about the deck chairs.
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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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The word for smoke should look like smoke - the word for rain should look like rain...
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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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'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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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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The game of Bees in the Trees is a variant of musical chairs and is best played with funeral music and in the open air. The object of the game is to sit down on a vacant chair when the music stops. If the chair sat in is occupied by bees, it is permissible to arrange a professional foul.
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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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Later this device of mirror and mirror-carriers will be developed and many changes rung from its possibilities.
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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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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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'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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Whispering can be a rest from a noisy world of words.
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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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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'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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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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Nun 1: Sir, it is only a play... with music. Do not distress yourself.
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I believe there's no such thing as history; there's only historians, and in English, we've got this word 'his'tory, but what about her story? So that, in the end, the history of the world would be a history of every single one of its members, but of course, you could never get to grips with that.
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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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'What good are all these books to you? You can't eat them! How can they make you happy?'
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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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A hand cannot write on itself.