Peter Greenaway: Trending quotes

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“All my films are somewhat experimental, they are all, each one, taking a certain amount of risk, but there's always the basic assumption that we should be able to appreciate the cinema as much with the mind as we can through emotional empathy. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.”

Peter Greenaway

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

“The word for smoke should look like smoke -- the word for rain should look like rain…”

Peter Greenaway

One of the calligraphers
The Pillow Book

“There is a shy client who uses invisible ink on Nagiko's body to hide his obvious talent. The woman attempts to develop the invisible ink by bathing in warm water, by standing as close as she dare to a hot fire, by washing her body in the juice of onion-skins until the onions make her weep and her tears prove to be the necessary solvent to reveal the writing.”

Peter Greenaway

Section J of 26 Facts About Flesh and Ink
The Pillow Book

“We went to Kyoto -- back to Japan -- to work in the Matsuo Tiasha shrine which Sei Shonagon had visited regularly. I couldn't give up such an opportunity. I was also a little homesick. We didn't finish walking the cat-walk until midnight when all the audience had gone. I didn't mind -- Sei Shonagon had watched the moon rise in that garden a thousand years ago -- I could have walked up and down that path all night long.”

Peter Greenaway

Nagiko's journal for Nov 9 1997
The Pillow Book

“The game of Bees in the Trees is a variant of musical chairs and is best played with funeral music and in the open air. The object of the game is to sit down on a vacant chair when the music stops. If the chair sat in is occupied by bees, it is permissible to arrange a professional foul.”

Peter Greenaway

Drowning By Numbers

“How can an opera express this complicated question of bedsheets?”

Peter Greenaway

Rosa: The Death of a Composer

“Go on. Treat me like the page of a book. Your book.”

Peter Greenaway

Jerome, to Nagiko
The Pillow Book

“Life is full of a thousand red herrings, and it takes the history of a civilisation to work out which are the red herrings and which aren't.”

Peter Greenaway

In an interview in Artforum, Nov. 83
Interviews

“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.”

Peter Greenaway

During the filming of Prospero's Books, quoted in an interview in American Film, Nov/Dec 1991
Prospero's Books

“The pages are so harmonious in their proportion / disharmony in the contents is impossible.”

Peter Greenaway

From the sixth book, "The Book of the Lover"
The Pillow Book

“Film is such an extraordinary rich medium which can handle so many different modes of operation, combining together in the same place all these extraordinary disciplines which may be executed in their own right -- music, writing, picture making of all kinds, and I often feel that some filmmakers make films with one eye closed and two hands tied behind their backs.”

Peter Greenaway

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

“You see how even an illness can be romanticized. Tuberculosis got the treatment: Keats, the Lady of the Camellias, the foggy dew, and so on. We must make romantic literature out of cancer -- can you imagine that?”

Peter Greenaway

Dear Boullée

“Isn't that why people keep diaries -- to be read by someone else? Why would they keep them otherwise?”

Peter Greenaway

Nagiko's husband
The Pillow Book

“The Romans are very equivocal about this building. They call it the typewriter or the wedding cake… But whatever you think of it -- it gives you the most amazing views of Rome. It's like a box at the theatre at which Rome is the play.”

Peter Greenaway

The Belly of An Architect

“It's like Shelley. Like Werther. Like a Japanese Ophelia. Like a beautiful Oriental Lady in the Lake.”

Peter Greenaway

Philip reacts to Mio's death
8 1/2 Women

“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.”

Peter Greenaway

In an interview in Cineaste, 1991
Interviews

“Is this a book exhausted from too much reading? Or too little reading?”

Peter Greenaway

From the fourth book, "The Book of Impotence"
The Pillow Book

“No we mustn't! She'll have us all audited.”

Peter Greenaway

Philip and Storey
8 1/2 Women

“… like us? Counting up the minutes -- have we spent half an hour together?”

Peter Greenaway

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

“I think it is really important to be in some way provocative -- either intellectually or viscerally -- in the films one makes.”

Peter Greenaway

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