Peter Greenaway Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The large body of the swan wedged in the shattered glass of the car windscreen fills the film frame. Its head is bent back on itself in a parody of its orthodox gracefulness.
-
I like a lot of glasses about - it highers the tone.
-
Painting: Once upon a time a painting was a two-dimensional representation; now it is anything its author thinks is appropriate.
-
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?
-
It is a most unexpected Earthquake in Geneva.
-
I always think that art is one of the most wonderful exciting curious ways to learn. I have no worries or apologies about art being used as a teaching medium.
-
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.
-
If Good approved of his creature's creation, He breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His name.
-
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.
-
Anybody who writes a diary insists it must be read by someone else.
-
All really worthwhile artists, creators, use the technology of their time, and anybody who doesn't becomes immediately a fossil.
-
A is for Adam and E is for Eve. B is for bile, blood and bones.
-
'What are you - some kind of addict? Is this where you come to...'
-
I can't think of anyone who has done anything remotely useful after the age of 80.
-
Dots ...: Small marks variously made to indicate infinity, hesitation, duplication, or lack of imagination.
-
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.
-
This is where I begin to do the writing. I am now going to be the pen and not the paper.
-
I want to be a prime creator - as every self-regarding artist should do.
-
We all know that we're going to die, but we don't know when. That's not a blessing, that's a curse.
-
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.
-
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.