Peter Greenaway Quotes
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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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'How safe are we here?'
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You can play lacrosse all over the world provided you know where the goalposts are.
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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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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?
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Nun 1: Sir, it is only a play... with music. Do not distress yourself.
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When I was young I hated my body because it was so thin - now I try not to look at it too much because it's so old. There perhaps might have been just six months when I felt comfortable with it - when I discovered alcohol for the first time and learnt to drive and was fattening out and had just met your mother.
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If you knew when you were going to die, wouldn't you make your life more worthwhile?
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Two children die. An accident and a suicide amongst so many murders. A chance death and a death of self-recrimination. Smut and the Skipping Girl have been aping their parents and elders - perhaps they could now teach them a lesson - all the machinations and game-playing and adjusting for sexual and emotional positioning is not worth the effort.
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'Imagine a world without a fixed point.'
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Painting: Once upon a time a painting was a two-dimensional representation; now it is anything its author thinks is appropriate.
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Itch to read, scratch to understand.
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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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We have to change the educational curricula and put a lot more emphasis on how important seeing and looking is.
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This is where I begin to do the writing. I am now going to be the pen and not the paper.
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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.
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It is a most unexpected Earthquake in Geneva.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Anybody who writes a diary insists it must be read by someone else.
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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.
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A is for Adam and E is for Eve. B is for bile, blood and bones.
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'Money's not interesting - too easy to get hold of.'