Peter Greenaway Quotes
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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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This drawing is three quarters ball, one quarter philosopher, which might be about the right space to keep a philosopher in his place.
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Benedictus bene dicap bene asian christian dominum nostrum amen.
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This book and I have become indivisible. I have placed my feet on this book's last pages, confident of standing so much higher in the world than I ever stood before.
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Imagine a world where nothing is stable. In the West, we have three moving elements - Air, Fire, Water - but at least we can depend on the fourth.
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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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'Money's not interesting - too easy to get hold of.'
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I'm a Darwinian.
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Obviously, I am the cook. The cook is the director. He arranges the menu, the seating order of the guests; he gives refuge to the lovers; he prepares the repast of the lover's body. The cook is a perfectionist and a rationalist, a portrait of myself.
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Men are so shit scared of female activities, especially if they are clandestine.
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You can play lacrosse all over the world provided you know where the goalposts are.
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We all live to a formula. Maybe the secret lies in keeping that formula secret.
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Nun 1: Sir, it is only a play... with music. Do not distress yourself.
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Twenty-four pulleys, one hundred counterweights / two lenses, dark shadows...
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All religions have always hated females.
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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?
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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.
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It's very difficult to understand, but I'm looking for a nonnarrative, multiscreen, present-tense cinema. Narrative is an artifact created by us. It does not exist at all in nature; it is a construct made by us, and I wonder whether we need the narrative anymore.
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As for critics, one mediocre writer is more valuable than ten good critics. They are like haughty, barren spinsters lodged in a maternity ward.
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'You could spend a lifetime reading in here.'
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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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We have more than enough deodorised, over-the-top, sentimental cinema. Let's try to bring a little human intelligence into things. It can be very rewarding.
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Cinema: An illusion that can only satisfactorily happen in the dark.
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Too late. Too late to retreat. Your heart is open. The book has got you. Your body is wide open. This rat of a book has invaded your privacy, worried its feeling into your entrails by every private passage.