Peter Greenaway Quotes
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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 admit that death is not just about you, it's also about the people who love you.
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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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I suppose I have a concern for this extraordinary, beautiful, amazing, exciting, taxonomically brilliant world that we live in, but we keep fucking it up all the time.
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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 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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Inspiration: A miasma originating in the head that pollutes the body and irritates good sense.
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All religions have always hated females.
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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 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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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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Is this a book exhausted from too much reading? Or too little reading?
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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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A is for Adam and E is for Eve. B is for bile, blood and bones.
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'We must ask Kito to come over.'
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For so many filmmakers, cinema is a means to an end.
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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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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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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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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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Prospero has always felt most at ease in a study, surrounded by books.
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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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'How safe are we here?'
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We all live to a formula. Maybe the secret lies in keeping that formula secret.