Peter Greenaway Quotes
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On the same day as I started to keep my own pillow-book - I met my future husband for the first time. I was six, he was ten. We did not exchange a word. He had been hand-picked by my father's publisher.
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As for the girl - the child of a prostitute - what of her future? A life of prostitution in a gaudy dress - pretending to be Nell Gwynne, the Protestant whore? No - out of her mother's earnings she will go to University and study to become an astronomer. Charles II made his mistress Nell Gwynne an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1674.
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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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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 don't know what to say really - except that you look immortal and I look bereft.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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The Romans are very equivocal about this building. They call it the typewriter or the wedding cake... But whatever you think of it - it gives you the most amazing views of Rome. It's like a box at the theatre at which Rome is the play.
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Inspiration: A miasma originating in the head that pollutes the body and irritates good sense.
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Counting is the most simple and primitive of narratives - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 - a tale with a beginning, a middle and an end and a sense of progression - arriving at a finish of two digits - a goal attained, a dénouement reached.
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A man bringing himself, melody and mathematics into perfect and enviable proportions. / only more so, much more so.
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You know to make his rigid, tedious, boring paintings seem at least a little human, the Mondrian enthusiasts keep insisting that Mondrian was a great tango dancer.
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I would be curious about one of those Jane Austen women - you know - long-suffering, dutiful - but all right in the end - a plump 19th century type, five foot four, ringlets, brown eyes, long fingers.
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Thanks to secondary education and the Internet, we're all knowledgeable now - if knowledge means the accumulation of facts. Curators are those who know how to maneuver around that knowledge.
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A woman materialises behind Prospero - leaning lightly on the back of his chair - she is alternately a Titianesque nude and then the Vesalius figure - flayed … she leans lightly over and kisses Prospero on the cheek. The kiss leaves a blood-red mark on his withered cheek. Prospero shivers.
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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.
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Is this a book exhausted from too much reading? Or too little reading?
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I admit that death is not just about you, it's also about the people who love you.
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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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The start of a film is like a gateway, a formal entrance-point. The first three minutes of a film make great demands on an audience's patience and credulity. A great deal has to be learnt very rapidly about place and attitude, character and intent and ambition.
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... there are tens of thousands of photographs taken here, all taken very patiently, because decay can be very slow.. Ten months for a human body... they say...
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If Good approved of his creature's creation, He breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His name.