Peter Greenaway: Trending quotes

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Peter Greenaway: 532 quotes4 likes

“Human relationships are patterned and cross-patterned and restricted and limited and de-limited and caged and freed again by the elaborate conventions, rules, and games we call Civilisation … the rules and the games are often absurd and farcical -- sometimes they are tragic -- yet we tacitly acknowledge that they are necessary.”

Peter Greenaway

Fear of Drowning By Numbers

“This book is gaudy like a gilded cauliflower which smells so bad after a good hot water soaking, like hot chocolate sweetened with sugar beet / incompatibles blended incongruously to no purpose.”

Peter Greenaway

From the fifth book, "The Book of the Exhibitionist"
The Pillow Book

“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…”

Peter Greenaway

Kito counting
8 1/2 Women

“It is an awesome sight, repeatedly drawn and painted. How long did it last, this Fall of Angels? Was it all over in an hour? Or did it take days, weeks, years? Is it still going on?”

Peter Greenaway

Flying Out of This World

“A man bringing himself, melody and mathematics into perfect and enviable proportions. / only more so, much more so.”

Peter Greenaway

"The Eisenstein Song"
M is for Man, Music, and Mozart

“Imagine you are sucking the little fingers of a lady… or… no, you wouldn't understand that -- since you'd never get that close to a lady -- who'd want to get that close to you for God's sake?”

Peter Greenaway

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover

“If you were not to be its victim, this book and body would amuse you with its arrogance. It would make you laugh. Because you were not its victim, you could feel no pain of betrayal.”

Peter Greenaway

From the eighth book, "The Book of the Seducer"
The Pillow Book

“Death is not necessarily an old and withered book with dry pages. It can be a thousand leaves of strong and shining text on a powerful body, held erect on the vertebrae of a strong spine. The heart hardly breathes because quietus has been reached, the torso is like a rock, the legs are rooted, the ink is dependable. If the words of death should be considered faded and sere -- where could be the dignity in dying?”

Peter Greenaway

From the thirteenth book, "The Book of the Dead"
The Pillow Book

“What's so special about it?”

Peter Greenaway

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover

“There are only two subjects that matters, one is sex and the other is death, what else we could talk about it. And most the cinema talks all the time about sex and death. And my cinema deals with sex and death so… ¿what's the problem?”

Peter Greenaway

Interview with El Tiempo in Bogotá, Colombia. October 2008 http://www.eltiempo.com/media/produccion/greenaway/#4 <br class="br">Interviews

“My brother works for a forestry commission. He writes only in green ink to persuade his bosses to make it a standard ecological colour for all forestry business. I asked him what colour ink he would use if he gave up eating whale meat and worked for a whaling company. He said whales were colour blind.”

Peter Greenaway

One of the calligraphers
The Pillow Book

“The cinema is about other things than storytelling. What you remember from a good film -- and let's only talk about good films -- is not the story, but a particular and hopefully unique experience that is about atmosphere, ambience, performance, style, an emotional attitude, gestures, singular events, a particular audio-visual experience that does not rely on the story.”

Peter Greenaway

"105 Years of Illustrated Text" in the Zoetrope All-Story, Vol. 5 No. 1.
105 Years of Illustrated Text

“A is for Adam and E is for Eve. B is for bile, blood and bones.”

Peter Greenaway

Louis Andriessen & Jeroen van der Linden, "The Alphabet Song"
M is for Man, Music, and Mozart

“Perhaps, sadly, in the end, cinema is only a translator's art, and you know what they say about translators: traitors all.”

Peter Greenaway

"105 Years of Illustrated Text" in the Zoetrope All-Story, Vol. 5 No. 1.
105 Years of Illustrated Text

“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.”

Peter Greenaway

Prospero's Books

“I was completely absorbed as to what would happen because anything was possible.”

Peter Greenaway

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover

“I have always found them very reasonable --they don't change their minds when you aren't looking at them. Each one can always be relied upon to say the same thing.”

Peter Greenaway

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover

“This drawing is three quarters ball, one quarter philosopher, which might be about the right space to keep a philosopher in his place.”

Peter Greenaway

Flying Out of This World

“On the other hand, I view the whole matter from a cosmic perspective. I don't take a position. I believe that there are no more positions to take, no certainties, no facts. Many people find this confusing about my films; they say I am hiding out behind irony. But from a cosmic viewpoint, it is eternally unimportant whether one lives or not.”

Peter Greenaway

In an interview in Die Zeit, 24 Nov 1989
Interviews