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All really worthwhile artists, creators, use the technology of their time, and anybody who doesn't becomes immediately a fossil.
Peter Greenaway -
'What do you mean - Happy anniversary? It's not my birthday.'
Peter Greenaway
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Four soiled bedsheets sewn together to make a screen. One for spittle. One for urine. One for semen. One for blood. All for tears.
Peter Greenaway -
It's sort of cathartic - the naked exposure - don't you think? You couldn't do it voluntarily - could you? It's under duress - so somehow legitimate. Circumstances beyond our control. I think I enjoyed that.
Peter Greenaway -
'What good are all these books to you? You can't eat them! How can they make you happy?'
Peter Greenaway -
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.
Peter Greenaway -
Investigation is never complete.
Peter Greenaway -
It is an awesome sight, repeatedly drawn and painted. How long did it last, this Fall of Angels? Was it all over in an hour? Or did it take days, weeks, years? Is it still going on?
Peter Greenaway
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If you knew when you were going to die, wouldn't you make your life more worthwhile?
Peter Greenaway -
The range of human skin colours is quite narrow when you think about it - and I do - and subtle - beige, pink, white, tan, taupe, ...
Peter Greenaway -
Twenty-four pulleys, one hundred counterweights / two lenses, dark shadows...
Peter Greenaway -
You see how even an illness can be romanticized. Tuberculosis got the treatment: Keats, the Lady of the Camellias, the foggy dew, and so on. We must make romantic literature out of cancer - can you imagine that?
Peter Greenaway -
The whole of this studio is bonded; that is to say, we are not officially in Japan per se, but rather, in what is considered for these purposes an adjunct of the customs shed at Narita airport. Officially, we are not here because we are pornographic. It's a rather curious situation.
Peter Greenaway -
Men are so shit scared of female activities, especially if they are clandestine.
Peter Greenaway
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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.
Peter Greenaway -
We all live to a formula. Maybe the secret lies in keeping that formula secret.
Peter Greenaway -
Americans don't understand what metaphor in cinema is about. They're extremely good at making straightforward, linear narrative movies, which entertain superbly. But they very rarely do anything else.
Peter Greenaway -
My biggest critical success was 'The Draughtsman's Contract,' but then it wasn't the English who particularly thought so; it was the French, who are much more interested in Cartesian logic: in finding your way through more cerebral puzzle-making, if you wish.
Peter Greenaway -
This book is past the first flush of youth. It is a book that is in puberty. It is hesitating, and from the vantage point of the mature reader, it is both a sad and amusing reminder of the part which is not always attractive enough to be revisited.
Peter Greenaway -
'How safe are we here?'
Peter Greenaway
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We all know that we're going to die, but we don't know when. That's not a blessing, that's a curse.
Peter Greenaway -
If Good approved of his creature's creation, He breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His name.
Peter Greenaway -
Too late. Too late to retreat. Your heart is open. The book has got you. Your body is wide open. This rat of a book has invaded your privacy, worried its feeling into your entrails by every private passage.
Peter Greenaway -
For 8,000 years, we've had lyric poetry; for 400 years we've had the novel: theatre hands its meaning down in text. Let's find a medium whose total, sole responsibility is the world as seen as a form of visual intelligence. Surely, surely, surely the cinema should be that phenomenon.
Peter Greenaway