Peter Greenaway Quotes
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Counting is the most simple and primitive of narratives - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 - a tale with a beginning, a middle and an end and a sense of progression - arriving at a finish of two digits - a goal attained, a dénouement reached.
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Inspiration: A miasma originating in the head that pollutes the body and irritates good sense.
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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.
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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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You know to make his rigid, tedious, boring paintings seem at least a little human, the Mondrian enthusiasts keep insisting that Mondrian was a great tango dancer.
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I loved Latin - the grammar, the difficult tenses, the history - but for some reason I was very bad at it, shamefully and blushingly bad at it. … In moments of stress the embarrassment of how bad I was at Latin - a subject I loved - really hit me. It was like being laughed at by someone you desperately loved.
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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.
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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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Is this a book exhausted from too much reading? Or too little reading?
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'What do you mean - Happy anniversary? It's not my birthday.'
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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.
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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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One film is based on the Medea myth about a woman who kills her own child - The Love of Ruins. It is almost a technical exercise to see if I can convince an audience or make an audience sympathetic to a woman who kills her own child.
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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 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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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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'We must ask Kito to come over.'
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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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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.
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Farewells can be both beautiful and despicable. Saying farewell to one who is loved is very complicated.
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The range of human skin colours is quite narrow when you think about it - and I do - and subtle - beige, pink, white, tan, taupe, ...
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'Imagine a world without a fixed point.'
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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.
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Itch to read, scratch to understand.