Peter Greenaway Quotes
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The game of Bees in the Trees is a variant of musical chairs and is best played with funeral music and in the open air. The object of the game is to sit down on a vacant chair when the music stops. If the chair sat in is occupied by bees, it is permissible to arrange a professional foul.
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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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We have to change the educational curricula and put a lot more emphasis on how important seeing and looking is.
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Dots ...: Small marks variously made to indicate infinity, hesitation, duplication, or lack of imagination.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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It is an awesome sight, repeatedly drawn and painted. How long did it last, this Fall of Angels? Was it all over in an hour? Or did it take days, weeks, years? Is it still going on?
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Itch to read, scratch to understand.
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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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Esmerelda, the grieving widow, continues to burn and scream. In our minds we rush to save her from the consuming flames. But cannot.
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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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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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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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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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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?
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Nun 1: Sir, it is only a play... with music. Do not distress yourself.
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Benedictus bene dicap bene asian christian dominum nostrum amen.
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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.