Peter Greenaway Quotes
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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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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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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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... 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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The pages are so harmonious in their proportion / disharmony in the contents is impossible.
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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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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 book to end all books. The final book. After this, there is no more writing, no more publishing.
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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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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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Nagiko, I am waiting for you. Meet me at the library. Any library. Every library. Yours, Jerome.
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Prospero has always felt most at ease in a study, surrounded by books.
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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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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.
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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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I'm an excuse for medical experiments and art theory. You must get me out of here and out of the hospital.
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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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It seems to me that dominant cinema seems to require an empathy or a sympathy between the film and the audience which is basically to do with the manipulation of the emotions and it seems to me again - and this is a very subjective position - that most cinema seems to trivialise the emotions, sentimentalising or romanticising them.
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Cinema is far too rich and capable a medium to be merely left to the storytellers.
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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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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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I want to describe the Body as a Book, a Book as a Body, and this Body and this Book will be the first Volume of Thirteen Volumes.
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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.