Peter Greenaway Quotes
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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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... 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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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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Cinema ceases to be passive and becomes active: you, the audience, are now, in some senses, in charge of the filmmaking process. You have all got mobile phones, you have all got cam recorders, and you've all got laptops, so you're all filmmakers.
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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.
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Is this a book exhausted from too much reading? Or too little reading?
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Inspiration: A miasma originating in the head that pollutes the body and irritates good sense.
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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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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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All religions have always hated females.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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If you want to tell stories, be a writer, not a filmmaker.
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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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'We must ask Kito to come over.'
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Human relationships are patterned and cross-patterned and restricted and limited and de-limited and caged and freed again by the elaborate conventions, rules, and games we call Civilisation … the rules and the games are often absurd and farcical - sometimes they are tragic - yet we tacitly acknowledge that they are necessary.
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As for critics, one mediocre writer is more valuable than ten good critics. They are like haughty, barren spinsters lodged in a maternity ward.
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A is for Adam and E is for Eve. B is for bile, blood and bones.
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Anybody who writes a diary insists it must be read by someone else.
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In the game of Dawn Card-Castles, fifty-two playing cards are stacked up into a castle in a draught-free space: the player can determine the dreams of the next night if he awakes before the castle collapses. Those players who wish to dream of Romance build their castle with the seven of hearts.
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Men are so shit scared of female activities, especially if they are clandestine.