Peter Greenaway Quotes
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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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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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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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'What are you - some kind of addict? Is this where you come to...'
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I'm a Darwinian.
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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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Cinema is far too rich and capable a medium to be merely left to the storytellers.
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We all live to a formula. Maybe the secret lies in keeping that formula secret.
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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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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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To be an atheist you have to have ten thousand times more imagination than if you are a religious fundamentalist. You must take the responsibility to acquire information, digest and use it to understand what you can.
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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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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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I want to be a prime creator - as every self-regarding artist should do.
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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.
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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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The film begins with a visual list of eight and a half Japanese Pachinko Parlours filmed in several Japanese cities - Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto.
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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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In practically every film you experience, you can see the director following the text. Illustrating the words first, making the pictures after, and, alas, so often not making pictures at all, but holding up the camera to do its mimetic worst.
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Cleverness: A predisposition to irritate excessively.
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Words reproduce themselves pleasurably too.
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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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In one of the rooms of the Fortuny Palace there are eight books from Prospero's Library. They are magical books. In many senses all books are magical.