Peter Greenaway Quotes
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Atlas, the man who carries the world, becomes the book of the maps of the world. An example of man, or God, into book. Few have that honour.
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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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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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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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'What do you mean - Happy anniversary? It's not my birthday.'
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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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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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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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As for the girl - the child of a prostitute - what of her future? A life of prostitution in a gaudy dress - pretending to be Nell Gwynne, the Protestant whore? No - out of her mother's earnings she will go to University and study to become an astronomer. Charles II made his mistress Nell Gwynne an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1674.
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Anybody who writes a diary insists it must be read by someone else.
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I like a lot of glasses about - it highers the tone.
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'Money's not interesting - too easy to get hold of.'
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Go on. Treat me like the page of a book. Your book.
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Men are so shit scared of female activities, especially if they are clandestine.
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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.
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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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Everything I try to do wants to be able to push communication through the notion of the visual image.
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Twenty-four pulleys, one hundred counterweights / two lenses, dark shadows...
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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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'What are you - some kind of addict? Is this where you come to...'
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A is for Adam and E is for Eve. B is for bile, blood and bones.
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Dots ...: Small marks variously made to indicate infinity, hesitation, duplication, or lack of imagination.
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We all live to a formula. Maybe the secret lies in keeping that formula secret.
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Why illustrate a great piece of writing whose very advocacy and evocation and efficacy lies within its very existence as writing?