Peter Greenaway Quotes
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Where is a book before it is born? Does a book grow like a tree? Who are a book's parents? Does a book need two parents - a mother and a father? Can a book be born inside another book? And where is the parent book of books?
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The penis - if you think about it - is the most enterprising engineering feat imaginable - a cantilevered structure, hydraulics, propulsion, pistons, compression, inflation, heat sensitive - practically every engineering characteristic - towers, draw-bridges, rocket-ships - no man-made engineering structure to match it.
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Most people are visually illiterate. Most people don't understand images: they don't understand how to interpret them or how to manufacture them.
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If you think about it, most cinema is built along 19th-century models. You would hardly think that the cinema had discovered James Joyce sometimes.
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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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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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I suppose I am gently cynical about notions of who we think we are, but I certainly don't hate my fellow man. I think my cinema, although it might often deal with death and decay, is highly celebratory.
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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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Secret: A private matter whispered abroad and never kept to oneself. By naming it a secret, we immediately indicate its presence. If we really wanted to keep secrets, we would not have a name for them.
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Jean Renoir once suggested that most true creators have only one idea and spend their lives reworking it, but then very rapidly he added that most people don't have any ideas at all, so one idea is pretty amazing.
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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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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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We have to change the educational curricula and put a lot more emphasis on how important seeing and looking is.
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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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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.
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It's strange. In the last five minutes you have used my Christian name over and over again and never before. People I like learn my name too late.
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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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All this takes many clumsy and inexact word-descriptions to describe, but if we read paintings like we read books, it would not be such a hidden language for painting can effortlessly produce such elegant solutions.
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Is this a book exhausted from too much reading? Or too little reading?
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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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Life is full of a thousand red herrings, and it takes the history of a civilisation to work out which are the red herrings and which aren't.
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It could be said now that all animals live in zoos, whether it is a zoo in Regent's Park, London or a Nigerian Game Reserve. Perhaps what's left to argue is only the zoo's quality.
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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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'How safe are we here?'