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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 quotes4 likes

Peter Greenaway Quotes

“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

“Hadrian… as you know an architect of note… put a lot of faith in stones… died peacefully… planning a Temple to Wisdom… still, he's dead. Nero -- best not to talk about him -- burnt Rome, caused untold misery, deserved to die; died screaming in a summerhouse.”

Peter Greenaway

The Belly of An Architect

“Book #8: The Vesalius Anatomy of Birth. As it hits the water, it screams and spurts blood like a pierced heart -- as it sinks, there is a suggestion of entrails.”

Peter Greenaway

Prospero's Books

“On the same day as I started to keep my own pillow-book -- I met my future husband for the first time. I was six, he was ten. We did not exchange a word. He had been hand-picked by my father's publisher.”

Peter Greenaway

Nagiko's journal for Sep 16 1993
The Pillow Book

“A final word. Drowning by Numbers is a story of three women who murder their husbands -- one in a bath, one in the sea and one in a swimming pool. It is a black and ironic fairy-tale for adults, half invented by children who are innocently obsessed with sex and death -- especially death. It is a poetic, amoral tale told morally to support the belief that the good are seldom rewarded, the bad go largely unpunished and the innocent are always abused.”

Peter Greenaway

Fear of Drowning By Numbers

“We wait -- it seems for minutes -- looking at the night sky. Then, suddenly breaking the silence and making us start with alarm and fear… there is a savage, heart-rending, gurgling scream.”

Peter Greenaway

Prospero's Books

“The Endgame: "The object of this game is to dare to fall with a noose around your neck from a place sufficiently off the ground such that a fall will hang you. The object of the game is to punish those who have caused great unhappiness by their selfish actions. This is the best game of all because the winner is also the loser and the judge's decision is always final."”

Peter Greenaway

Drowning By Numbers

“… and within five minutes I'd lost interest.”

Peter Greenaway

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

“I think that films or indeed any art work should be made in a way that they are infinitely viewable; so that you could go back to it time and time again, not necessarily immediately but over a space of time, and see new things in it, or new ways of looking at it.”

Peter Greenaway

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

“Finally we hit upon the old cathedral of Amsterdam, which belongs to the Reformed Church and which we remodeled. The owners gave us permission, on certain financial conditions, to shoot the film there. Before that, we had planned to use the cathedral of Cologne, but two days before we began our preparations, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover was shown on German television and the archbishop immediately forbade us from entering the cathedral site!”

Peter Greenaway

From an interview in Positif, January 1994
Interviews

“Americans don't understand what metaphor in cinema is about. They're extremely good at making straightforward, linear narrative movies, which entertain superbly. But they very rarely do anything else.”

Peter Greenaway

In an interview in Film Comment, May/June 1990
Interviews

“Take Mitchel here -- no -- on second thoughts -- don't -- because he's a crude little bugger.”

Peter Greenaway

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

“It's strange. In the last five minutes you have used my Christian name over and over again and never before. People I like learn my name too late.”

Peter Greenaway

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

“It serves the purpose of not serving a purpose, surely quite a valid one.”

Peter Greenaway

In an interview in Artforum, Nov. 83
Interviews

“Roy, this is my wife, Georgina Spica -- she has a heart of gold and a body to match… and I am Albert Spica and I have a heart of gold and a great deal of money to match.”

Peter Greenaway

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

“Imagine a world without a fixed point.”

Peter Greenaway

8 1/2 Women

“I never go to the cinema. I can't stand sitting in the dark with strangers -- all of us obliged to share the same emotional experiences -- it's too intimate. I like to be emotional in private.”

Peter Greenaway

Philip
8 1/2 Women

“A trembling and some laughter, / a squirt of pee, a spit, / whispers of the heart, / a smell, / the drift to sleep, / pursuit by Gods, / exposure of the bum, / mathematics …”

Peter Greenaway

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

“Jerome was dyslexic until he was twelve, before it became fashionable. And he broke every pair of glasses I bought him. He hated wearing glasses. He was good at breaking things. Especially relationships. Just like his father.”

Peter Greenaway

Jerome's mother
The Pillow Book

“No -- it's not necessary for a bookkeeper to read all the stock.”

Peter Greenaway

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

“The major sweep of this book's living is too often marred by qualifying. It is hedged about with ifs and buts and if onlys and howevers, excuses for a life that is about to shut its covers for the last time and then crumple into dust in an unseen and never-to-be-remembered library.”

Peter Greenaway

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

“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

“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

“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

“I wouldn't be so interested in her fingers.”

Peter Greenaway

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

“I would be curious about one of those Jane Austen women -- you know -- long-suffering, dutiful -- but all right in the end -- a plump 19th century type, five foot four, ringlets, brown eyes, long fingers.”

Peter Greenaway

Philip
8 1/2 Women

“Prospero has always felt most at ease in a study, surrounded by books.”

Peter Greenaway

Prospero's Books

“When I was young I hated my body because it was so thin -- now I try not to look at it too much because it's so old. There perhaps might have been just six months when I felt comfortable with it -- when I discovered alcohol for the first time and learnt to drive and was fattening out and had just met your mother.”

Peter Greenaway

Philip
8 1/2 Women

“There is nothing more splendid than the prospect of sitting in the morning before a new ink-stone and a sheet of white paper. The smell of the white paper is like the scent of the skin of a new lover who has just paid a surprise visit out of a rainy garden. And the black ink is like lacquered hair. And the quill? Well the quill is like the instrument of pleasure whose purpose is never in doubt but whose surprising efficiency one always -- always forgets.”

Peter Greenaway

, quoted in Peter Greenaway's The
The Pillow Book