Peter Greenaway Quotes
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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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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.
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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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If you want to tell stories, be a writer, not a filmmaker.
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Alas, despite wing implants, feathers and wax, and carnal associations with swans, we will never grow wings. Alas, any true flight we make will always be externally assisted. Alas, the best we can do is fall and believe ourselves flying.
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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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All religions have always hated females.
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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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A is for Adam and E is for Eve. B is for bile, blood and bones.
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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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Inspiration: A miasma originating in the head that pollutes the body and irritates good sense.
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For so many filmmakers, cinema is a means to an end.
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We all live to a formula. Maybe the secret lies in keeping that formula secret.
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Is this a book exhausted from too much reading? Or too little reading?
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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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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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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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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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Prospero has always felt most at ease in a study, surrounded by books.
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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 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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'We must ask Kito to come over.'
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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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'How safe are we here?'