Peter Greenaway Quotes
-
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.
-
Is this a book exhausted from too much reading? Or too little reading?
-
The range of human skin colours is quite narrow when you think about it - and I do - and subtle - beige, pink, white, tan, taupe, ...
-
For so many filmmakers, cinema is a means to an end.
-
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.
-
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.
-
... 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...
-
'We must ask Kito to come over.'
-
'What do you mean - Happy anniversary? It's not my birthday.'
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
'How safe are we here?'
-
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.
-
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.
-
There have been innumerable films about film-making, but Otto e Mezzo was a film about the processes of thinking about making a film - certainly the most enjoyable part of any cinema creation.
-
Painting: Once upon a time a painting was a two-dimensional representation; now it is anything its author thinks is appropriate.
-
I like a lot of glasses about - it highers the tone.
-
Farewells can be both beautiful and despicable. Saying farewell to one who is loved is very complicated.
-
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?
-
'Imagine a world without a fixed point.'
-
It is a most unexpected Earthquake in Geneva.
-
Go on. Treat me like the page of a book. Your book.