Peter Greenaway: Trending quotes

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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.”

Peter Greenaway

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

“Cleverness: A predisposition to irritate excessively.”

Peter Greenaway

Rosa: The Death of a Composer

“Cinema is dead. I can give you a date - it died on the 31st of September, 1983, when the zapper or the remote control was introduced to the livings rooms of the world. Bang! That's the end.”

Peter Greenaway

NoTV Interview with Peter Greenaway on VJ-ing http://www.petergreenaway.info/content/view/125/68/ <br class="br">Interviews

“Naked! So I can see no pranks and ruses.”

Peter Greenaway

8 1/2 Women

“What initially attracted me to The Seventh Seal was that it had values and characteristics which I was familiar with in other art forms, most notably, the European novel and certain forms on English drama, and indeed, in relation to my rather academic interest in history -- not "history" in the normal sense, but history as a form of entertainment. It might be a very unfashionable view but I believe that history is an amazing bank or reserve area of plots, characterisations, extraordinary events, etc.”

Peter Greenaway

From an interview in Art and Design, no. 49
Interviews

“… Sir Isaac Newton, the subject of this cake, is in every Englishman's wallet… he's on the English one-pound note. I always carry one on me for good luck. A man who discovered gravity and thus successfully secured our feet on the ground is a good companion. In fixing us to the earth, he enabled us -- with equanimity -- to permit our heads to remain in the clouds.”

Peter Greenaway

The Belly of An Architect

“You know to make his rigid, tedious, boring paintings seem at least a little human, the Mondrian enthusiasts keep insisting that Mondrian was a great tango dancer.”

Peter Greenaway

Philip
8 1/2 Women

“Four soiled bedsheets sewn together to make a screen. One for spittle. One for urine. One for semen. One for blood. All for tears.”

Peter Greenaway

Rosa: The Death of a Composer

“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.”

Peter Greenaway

, quoted in Peter Greenaway's The
The Pillow Book

“These buildings are just right for the excesses of post-modernism -- decorative, frivolous -- serving to obviously excite and attract -- every feature using the architectural vocabulary freely without too much regard for serious function -- open glass atriums and shining metals and expensive and artificial marbles, zany letterings and excess neon.”

Peter Greenaway

8 1/2 Women

“I once saw a film where the main character didn't speak for the first half hour.”

Peter Greenaway

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

“Gonzalo threw many books into the bottom of the leaky vessel that took Prospero out on to the sea away from Italy and Europe into exile. Shakespeare does not, of course, elaborate what these volumes were. Prospero's Books speculates. There would need perhaps to be books on navigation and survival, there would need to be books for an elderly scholar to learn how to rear and educate a young daughter, how to colonise an island, farm it, subjugate its inhabitants, identify its plants and husband its wild beasts. There would need to be books to offer solace and advise patience and put past glory and present despondency into perspective. There would need to be books to encourage revenge.”

Peter Greenaway

Prospero's Books

“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.”

Peter Greenaway

From an interview in Art and Design, no. 49
Interviews

“Too many stupid people have it.”

Peter Greenaway

Two moviegoers
8 1/2 Women

“You can't write. That's not writing. It's scribbling. Distasteful scribbling. Why can't you write properly?”

Peter Greenaway

Nagiko, to Jerome
The Pillow Book

“Georgie doesn't like babies do you Georgie? Some days, Georgie, I think you behave like a bloke.”

Peter Greenaway

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

“Prospero's power is held in his relationship to his books, and The Tempest is witness to more than a few apparently conflicting facets of his personality -- not all of them particularly praiseworthy. What was it, in those books, that made Prospero not only powerful but also a moralising schold and a petty revenger, a benevolent despote, a jealous father and also a master designer of song and dance? Are we truly the product of what we read?”

Peter Greenaway

Prospero's Books

“Sappho was a worshipper of the Aphrodite cult and on the island of Lesbos there were many cliff-jumpers. They all jumped. Some may say they flew in ecstasy. If only for nine seconds -- one second for each string of the lyre.”

Peter Greenaway

Flying Out of This World

“All this could be enough -- we would leave an Impressionist painting at this stage -- probably much earlier -- and leave it possibly with great satisfaction.”

Peter Greenaway

Fear of Drowning By Numbers

“All the material is fictional and develops its own eight and a half private, coelesced journeys, where, perhaps not unexpectedly, the females can run faster than the men and trade their freedoms by exhausting the male sexual fantasies and replacing them by some of their own.”

Peter Greenaway

From the introduction to 8 1/2 Women
8 1/2 Women