Peter Greenaway Quotes
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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 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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It's a big criticism of Greenaway films that they are far too interested in formalism and not enough interested in notions of emotional content. It's a criticism I can fully understand from a public that has been brought up by Hollywood movies that demand intense emotional rapport.
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Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward.
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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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Cleverness: A predisposition to irritate excessively.
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Each word is pumped up with consonant cholesterol. It's full of fat words. The pages cream with subcutaneous fat. New letters are gilded like showy teeth, making comprehension constipated and exorbitantly metalled.
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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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This book has neither the virtue of irony nor deserves the sympathy reserved for the truly mad.
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Words reproduce themselves pleasurably too.
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As you probably know, I'm often accused of intellectual exhibitionism and all forms of elitism. Although I can understand this point of view, it's a rather wasted argument because, if we regard areas of information as being elite and therefore somehow not usable, it means our centre-ground of activity becomes very, very impoverished.
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I think there is no future whatsoever in 3D. It does nothing to the grammar and syntax or vocabulary of cinema. And you get fed up with it in exactly 3 minutes.
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If a player in the game of Deadman's Catch drops a skittle, he is obliged to suffer a succession of handicaps. First to catch using one hand, then to catch kneeling on one knee, then on two knees, then with one eye closed. If a player finally drops a catch with both eyes closed, then he is out and must take his place in the winding-sheet.
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Jerome never liked me - preferred my sister who was a little fool excited by modern literature - all swear-words and scatology - before it became fashionable.
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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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I also think that everyone has an elitist approach to his own art, a complex knowledge of it, whether he is a clockmaker or an engineer. And I think it's perfectly legitimate to make use of this knowledge because it enriches the overall texture of life.
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You can't write. That's not writing. It's scribbling. Distasteful scribbling. Why can't you write properly?
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It can hardly be said that Greenaway is unaware of his demoniac cleverness, but he unearths the nuggets buried in his work in a spirit of generosity. They are not so much possessions to be admired as gifts to be shared.
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'Have you read all of them?'
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The pretence that numbers are not the humble creation of man, but are the exacting language of the Universe and therefore possess the secret of all things, is comforting, terrifying and mesmeric.
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Blind eyes cannot read.
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A little gold and a little charcoal, / A little bone, a little wax. / A little alcohol, a little horror and a little gum. / A little ivory, / a little sulphur, / a little damp dust, / a sluice of fluids.
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Delivery: A postal or natal event.
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Shoes: gloves for the feet.