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Peter Greenaway Quotes
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Peter Greenaway, is a British film director, screenwriter, and artist. His films are noted for the distinct influence of Renaissance and Baroque painting, and Flemish painting in particular. Common traits in his film are the scenic composition and illumination and the contrasts of costume and nudity, nature and architecture, furniture and people, sexual pleasure and painful death. Wikipedia  

✵ 5. April 1942
Peter Greenaway photo
Peter Greenaway: 266   quotes 4   likes

Peter Greenaway Quotes

“Whispering can be a rest from a noisy world of words.”

Peter Greenaway

The tenth book, "The Book of Silence"
The Pillow Book

World

“I like a lot of glasses about -- it highers the tone.”

Peter Greenaway

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

“These ideas are present in all sorts of unrelated cultures -- the Easter Islands, Celtic mythology, Plato's Symposium with its notion that we are all originally hermaphrodite. We became too arrogant and so the gods split us down the middle, forcing us to spend our lives chasing our other half. If we start being arrogant all over again, God will come down and split each half in half, and it will take four people to assemble a fifth, making our lives peculiarly, desperately difficult.”

Peter Greenaway

In an interview in the Washington DC City Paper, 6 Apr 1990
Interviews

God , People , Idea

“There is some comfort to be had in contemplating the folly of so many dead, don't you think? … and more comfort still in contemplating the continuity.”

Peter Greenaway

The Belly of An Architect

Thinking , Dead

“It could be said now that all animals live in zoos, whether it is a zoo in Regent's Park, London or a Nigerian Game Reserve. Perhaps what's left to argue is only the zoo's quality.”

Peter Greenaway

From the introduction to the published script.
A Zed and Two Noughts

Game , Animals

“Perhaps. I need writing. Don't ask me why -- just take out your pen and write your name on my arm -- go on.”

Peter Greenaway

Jerome and Nagiko
The Pillow Book

“Cinema: An illusion that can only satisfactorily happen in the dark.”

Peter Greenaway

Rosa: The Death of a Composer

“The film has written and spoken dialogue in twenty-five languages-English, French, Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Latin, Hebrew, necrotic Egyptian … and it has written calligraphic text on paper, wood, and flesh, on flat and curved surfaces, vertically and horizontally, on both living and dead flesh, in neon, on screens, in projection, as sub-title, inter-title, and sur-title, as High Art and low art, as advertisement and banker's check and registration plate, on photograph, on blackboard, as letter correspondence, as photocopy facsimile, and spoken, chanted, and sung, with and without music … a mocking challenge. You want text? Cinema wants text? Cinema pretends to eschew text? Then we can give you text to mock that smug suggestion that cinema thinks it is pictures.”

Peter Greenaway

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

Art , Music , Thinking , Dead

“The game Flights of Fancy or Reverse Strip Jump is played from as high a jumping-point as a competitor will dare. After each successful jump, the competitor is allowing to put on an article of clothing. Thirteen jumps is normally more than enough to see a competitor fully dressed for the day.”

Peter Greenaway

Drowning By Numbers

Game , Success , Clothes

“A hand cannot write on itself.”

Peter Greenaway

From the ninth book, "The Book of Secrets"
The Pillow Book

“Atlas, the man who carries the world, becomes the book of the maps of the world. An example of man, or God, into book. Few have that honour.”

Peter Greenaway

Flying Out of This World

God , Books , World

“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.”

Peter Greenaway

From the first book, "The Agenda"
The Pillow Book

Books

“I can -- your mother's dead.”

Peter Greenaway

Storey and Philip
8 1/2 Women

Dead

“ "What days are those Albert? And what's it like?"”

Peter Greenaway

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

“You can play lacrosse all over the world provided you know where the goalposts are.”

Peter Greenaway

In an interview in Artforum, Nov. 83
Interviews

World

“You can say with safety that nowadays women have finally acknowledged their position of not liking men. We could say now that women don't like men. They can acknowledge that they prefer the company of their own kind. I think we can also say generally that most men do not like other men. Most men prefer to like women. So women are the most liked by the most people. Men love women, women love children, and children love hamsters. A one-way slide. There is little going back the other way. Can hamsters love children? I leave you to deduce the rest.”

Peter Greenaway

Palmira
8 1/2 Women

Love , Women , Men , Children

“Are animals like car-crashes -- Acts of God or mere Accidents -- bizarre, tragic, farcical, plotted nowadays into a scenario by an ingenious storyteller, Mr C Darwin?”

Peter Greenaway

From the introduction to the published script.
A Zed and Two Noughts

God , Cars , Animals

“Nagiko, I am waiting for you. Meet me at the library. Any library. Every library. Yours, Jerome.”

Peter Greenaway

Jerome's suicide note
The Pillow Book

Waiting

“Leaving slowly, / sucking in cold air round a warm tongue, / ennui synchronized to the pulse, / reports from a coiled trachea, / It is only irregular clocks…”

Peter Greenaway

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

“Taupe? What sort of colour is "taupe"? It sounds like a Malaysian ground sloth encountered once every fifty years by one of the Attenboroughs wearing long socks.”

Peter Greenaway

Storey
8 1/2 Women

“The predominant colour of the kitchen -- its walls, cupboards, floor, shelves -- with all the ancillary rooms -- pantries, larders, cold stores, and sculleries, is green -- Hooker's dark green, leaf-green, emerald, faded turquoise, and eau-de-nile -- like the colours of a dark wet jungle.”

Peter Greenaway

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

“It is a most unexpected Earthquake in Geneva.”

Peter Greenaway

Final line of the published script.
8 1/2 Women

“It seems to me that the comprehension and enjoyment of the reader, as opposed to the viewer, is best served in printing this version rather than a slavish definitive transcription. Besides, what film is truly definitive? By the time you see the film it may very well be sub-titled, re-edited, shortened, even censored, and every film is viewed at the discretion of the projectionist, the cinema manager, the architect of the cinema, the comfort of your seat and the attention of your neighbour.”

Peter Greenaway

From the Author's Note to the published script.
A Zed and Two Noughts

Time

“This book and I have become indivisible. I have placed my feet on this book's last pages, confident of standing so much higher in the world than I ever stood before.”

Peter Greenaway

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

Books , World , Confidence

“A final splash plops … all water-movement ceases and the screen is a black velvet void.”

Peter Greenaway

Final words of the published script.
Prospero's Books

Water

“All this narcissism is rather boring, isn't it?”

Peter Greenaway

Philip
8 1/2 Women

“Esmerelda, the grieving widow, continues to burn and scream. In our minds we rush to save her from the consuming flames. But cannot.”

Peter Greenaway

Rosa: The Death of a Composer

“Have you read all of them?”

Peter Greenaway

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

Reading

“No Albert -- it's not God -- it's Michael. My lover. You vowed you would kill him -- and you did. And you vowed you would eat him. Now eat him.”

Peter Greenaway

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

God , Lovers

“The floorboards point in parallel lines to a vanishing point that does not concern us -- somewhere beyond the opera house, across the streets, across the houses of the suburbs, all the way to a hypothetical single dot… on the sea's horizon. Far from this sour drama.”

Peter Greenaway

Rosa: The Death of a Composer

Way , Housing , Sea

“This book has neither the virtue of irony nor deserves the sympathy reserved for the truly mad.”

Peter Greenaway

From the third book, "The Book of the Idiot"
The Pillow Book

Books , Madness

“There is no obligation for the author of a film to believe in, or to sympathise with, the moral behaviour of his characters. Nor is he necessarily to be accredited with the same opinions as his characters. Nor is it necessary or obligatory for him to believe in the tenet of his construction -- all of which is a disclaimer to the notion that the author of Drowning by Numbers believes that all men are weak, enfeebled, loutish, boorish and generally inadequate and incompetent as partners for women. But it's a thought.”

Peter Greenaway

Fear of Drowning By Numbers

Women , Men

“Titus… he started well… soon became greedy… disembowelled on the Tiber steps… he's dead, died screaming…”

Peter Greenaway

The Belly of An Architect

Dead

“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.”

Peter Greenaway

Jerome's mother
The Pillow Book

Fools , Literature , Fashion , Sister

“Rubbish -- absolute rubbish!”

Peter Greenaway

Storey and Philip
8 1/2 Women

“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.”

Peter Greenaway

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

“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/
Interviews

World , Dead

“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

Art , History , Sense

“… 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

Painting

“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

Tear

“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

Life , Literature , Dependency

“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

Books , Education , Revenge , Learning

“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