Peter Greenaway Quotes
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Itch to read, scratch to understand.
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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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Twenty-four pulleys, one hundred counterweights / two lenses, dark shadows...
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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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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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Americans don't understand what metaphor in cinema is about. They're extremely good at making straightforward, linear narrative movies, which entertain superbly. But they very rarely do anything else.
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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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We all live to a formula. Maybe the secret lies in keeping that formula secret.
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... flaunting their erudition and relishing overt staginess, Peter Greenaway's films divide audiences. There are those who are prepared to entertain his conceits and play the game, and others for whom a Greenaway film is about as exciting as a guided tour through an ancient museum where the catalogue has been lost.
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Dots ...: Small marks variously made to indicate infinity, hesitation, duplication, or lack of imagination.
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There are basically only two subject matters in all Western culture: sex and death. We do have some ability to manipulate sex nowadays. We have no ability, and never will have, to manipulate death.
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You should be allowed to rub out and start again, it means that you are human. The purists are tedious, they tell you a mistake is like an enduring black mark. Nonsense - better to be human than some infernal machine never going wrong.
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Cinema is far too rich and capable a medium to be merely left to the storytellers.
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'You could spend a lifetime reading in here.'
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All really worthwhile artists, creators, use the technology of their time, and anybody who doesn't becomes immediately a fossil.
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'Money's not interesting - too easy to get hold of.'
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The floorboards point in parallel lines to a vanishing point that does not concern us - somewhere beyond the opera house, across the streets, across the houses of the suburbs, all the way to a hypothetical single dot... on the sea's horizon. Far from this sour drama.
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The book to end all books. The final book. After this, there is no more writing, no more publishing.
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I can't think of anyone who has done anything remotely useful after the age of 80.
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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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At once, far off... begins a rumbling, droning noise - like a thousand distant flying machines - like the sound of an armada of mechanical birds - a noise reminiscent of implacable, massive stage machinery in a masque or pageant that is several streets away. It is not one sound but many sounds combined. This is the sound of Prospero's magic.
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Nagiko, I am waiting for you. Meet me at the library. Any library. Every library. Yours, Jerome.
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I cannot keep a clock or a watch. They stop on me. Why won't time stay peacefully on my wrist? Is time not interested in me any more because I am dying?