Peter Greenaway: Trending quotes (page 11)

“It's so miserable and so easy to keep slamming Titanic -- I'll shut up.”

“Then I think you have a choice -- please your mother or face criminal charges.”

“I've always been fascinated by maps and cartography. A map tells you where you've been, where you are, and where you're going -- in a sense it's three tenses in one.”

“French Cuisine. By Guillaume Rosart. Publisher Henri Simonel. In 1950 it cost me twenty francs -- about 2 pounds -- about 15 pounds now.”

“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.”

“There have been innumerable films about film-making, but Otto e Mezzo was a film about the processes of thinking about making a film -- certainly the most enjoyable part of any cinema creation.”

“Words reproduce themselves pleasurably too.”

“The range of human skin colours is quite narrow when you think about it -- and I do -- and subtle -- beige, pink, white, tan, taupe, …”

“Shoes: gloves for the feet.”

“A French critic referred to me as a gay pessimist, with gay used in its older sense, and talked of Cocteau in the same breath.”

“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…”

“I don't have any particular wish to be polemical or didactic; I don't have a "message", but what I do thoroughly enjoy are those works of art, not necessarily in the cinema, but in the other arts as well, which have an encyclopaedic world.”

“This is a book and a body that is so warm to the touch. My touch.”

“A long white dress that starts under the breast and travels on interminably down -- so their legs are entirely mysterious -- they could have one leg or two inside that dress… A Jane Austen woman could be incredibly passionate inside that dress.”

“That comes from most people having an American film model in their heads which is nothing but a total illusionary masturbatory massage.”

“The large body of the swan wedged in the shattered glass of the car windscreen fills the film frame. Its head is bent back on itself in a parody of its orthodox gracefulness.”

“Painting: Once upon a time a painting was a two-dimensional representation; now it is anything its author thinks is appropriate.”

“A thrown-stone trajectory is a good metaphor for so many phenomena: the curve of an event, any event; the curve of a life, any life; the curve of a hypothesis; the curve experienced in the manufacture of a work of art; the curve of interest experienced in the manufacture of a catalogue.”

“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.”