Peter Greenaway Quotes
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Painting: Once upon a time a painting was a two-dimensional representation; now it is anything its author thinks is appropriate.
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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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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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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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Itch to read, scratch to understand.
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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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Where is a book before it is born? Does a book grow like a tree? Who are a book's parents? Does a book need two parents - a mother and a father? Can a book be born inside another book? And where is the parent book of books?
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Dots ...: Small marks variously made to indicate infinity, hesitation, duplication, or lack of imagination.
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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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We all know that we're going to die, but we don't know when. That's not a blessing, that's a curse.
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'You could spend a lifetime reading in here.'
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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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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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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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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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It is a most unexpected Earthquake in Geneva.
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'Money's not interesting - too easy to get hold of.'
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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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Benedictus bene dicap bene asian christian dominum nostrum amen.
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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?
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A series of ever-decreasing splashes drip and plop into black water... thus the beginning of the film is reprised.
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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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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.