-
I like a lot of glasses about - it highers the tone.
Peter Greenaway
-
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.
Peter Greenaway
-
If Good approved of his creature's creation, He breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His name.
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
-
Inspiration: A miasma originating in the head that pollutes the body and irritates good sense.
Peter Greenaway
-
... 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...
Peter Greenaway
-
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.
Peter Greenaway
-
Is this a book exhausted from too much reading? Or too little reading?
Peter Greenaway
-
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.
Peter Greenaway
-
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.
Peter Greenaway
-
'What do you mean - Happy anniversary? It's not my birthday.'
Peter Greenaway
-
'We must ask Kito to come over.'
Peter Greenaway
-
A man bringing himself, melody and mathematics into perfect and enviable proportions. / only more so, much more so.
Peter Greenaway
-
Go on. Treat me like the page of a book. Your book.
Peter Greenaway
-
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.
Peter Greenaway
-
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.
Peter Greenaway
-
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.
Peter Greenaway
-
She picks up the baby and contemplates the Bonsai-bush, and, as we watch, in the growing half-dark, the Bonsai-bush flowers. On the black-and-white film, the thousands of flower-petals blush a deep red.
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
-
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.
Peter Greenaway
-
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.
Peter Greenaway
-
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.
Peter Greenaway
-
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.
Peter Greenaway
-
'How safe are we here?'
Peter Greenaway
