Peter Greenaway Quotes
-
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.
-
'Naked! So I can see no pranks and ruses.'
-
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.
-
I admit that death is not just about you, it's also about the people who love you.
-
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.
-
We have to change the educational curricula and put a lot more emphasis on how important seeing and looking is.
-
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.
-
I don't know what to say really - except that you look immortal and I look bereft.
-
... 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...
-
A French critic referred to me as a gay pessimist, with gay used in its older sense, and talked of Cocteau in the same breath.
-
The large body of the swan wedged in the shattered glass of the car windscreen fills the film frame. Its head is bent back on itself in a parody of its orthodox gracefulness.
-
Inspiration: A miasma originating in the head that pollutes the body and irritates good sense.
-
All religions have always hated females.
-
Is this a book exhausted from too much reading? Or too little reading?
-
A man bringing himself, melody and mathematics into perfect and enviable proportions. / only more so, much more so.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Prospero has always felt most at ease in a study, surrounded by books.
-
My brother works for a forestry commission. He writes only in green ink to persuade his bossess to make it a standard ecological colour for all forestry business. I asked him what colour ink he would use if he gave up eating whale meat and worked for a whaling company. He said whales were colour blind.
-
A is for Adam and E is for Eve. B is for bile, blood and bones.
-
As for critics, one mediocre writer is more valuable than ten good critics. They are like haughty, barren spinsters lodged in a maternity ward.
-
If you want to tell stories, be a writer, not a filmmaker.
-
'We must ask Kito to come over.'
-
We wait - it seems for minutes - looking at the night sky. Then, suddenly breaking the silence and making us start with alarm and fear... there is a savage, heart-rending, gurgling scream.