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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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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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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Nun 1: Sir, it is only a play... with music. Do not distress yourself.
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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.
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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.
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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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A is for Adam and E is for Eve. B is for bile, blood and bones.
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'Money's not interesting - too easy to get hold of.'
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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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I can't think of anyone who has done anything remotely useful after the age of 80.
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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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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.
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'You could spend a lifetime reading in here.'
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Men are so shit scared of female activities, especially if they are clandestine.
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'What are you - some kind of addict? Is this where you come to...'
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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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All really worthwhile artists, creators, use the technology of their time, and anybody who doesn't becomes immediately a fossil.
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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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I want to be a prime creator - as every self-regarding artist should do.
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Twenty-four pulleys, one hundred counterweights / two lenses, dark shadows...
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I am certain that there are two things in life which are dependable - the delights of the flesh and the delights of literature. I have had the good fortune to bring them together and enjoy them together in full quantity.
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Cinema is far too rich and capable a medium to be merely left to the storytellers.
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I'm a Darwinian.