Peter Greenaway Quotes
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The pages are so harmonious in their proportion / disharmony in the contents is impossible.
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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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We all live to a formula. Maybe the secret lies in keeping that formula secret.
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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 would certainly like to work with Dennehy again. When he was presented with the script he didn't know me from Adam, and why should he, small-time eccentric, esoteric Englishman that I am?
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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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... 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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It is Vesalius' Anatomy of Birth - a book of drawings and diagrams of human anatomy. Beautiful drawings but - as the pages turn - terrible in their frankness...
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1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 37 ...
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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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Leaving slowly, / sucking in cold air round a warm tongue, / ennui synchronized to the pulse, / reports from a coiled trachea, / It is only irregular clocks...
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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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Prospero has always felt most at ease in a study, surrounded by books.
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Cinema: An illusion that can only satisfactorily happen in the dark.
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And I've also written a play called Miranda, about what happens afterwards on the ship on the way home. It's about what happens to innocence and how it has to be destroyed.
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It is the trajectory of a thrown stone. It follows the hump of a humped-back whale from nose to tail. It's bounded like a smooth, sheep-cropped, grassy hill. It is a graph-line through a grey, blue, and then a grey again, sky.
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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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The world is in his cloak - figures peer out of its folds - mythological figures and snakes and pigs and flowers, naked fauns and heavy-breasted sirens and horses' heads - they sprawl on the flagstones at his feet and peep out from under his arms...
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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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It's like Shelley. Like Werther. Like a Japanese Ophelia. Like a beautiful Oriental Lady in the Lake.
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Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward.
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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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Grief: An emotional experience often brought about by a great sense of loss. The subject of this loss is completely immaterial.
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This book has neither the virtue of irony nor deserves the sympathy reserved for the truly mad.