Peter Greenaway Quotes

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“There is another earthquake in Kyoto. We appreciate it lyrically. A slide of dust slips along a roof gully. A large tree of golden petals shakes and the petals drift to the floor. Birds fly up. Bottles of clear liquid in a shop quiver on a shelf. The water in a puddle shimmers reflections up a wall. A collection of grey roof tiles shift and -- ever faster -- begin to slide down a roof slope.”

“All this takes many clumsy and inexact word-descriptions to describe, but if we read paintings like we read books, it would not be such a hidden language for painting can effortlessly produce such elegant solutions.”

“Investigation is never complete.”

“Inspiration: A miasma originating in the head that pollutes the body and irritates good sense.”

“We must ask Kito to come over.”

“The moistened thumb of the expectant reader has not yet marked the soft tissues of this lean clean smiling volume. Spread me, and break me open, for pleasure.”

“Lincoln: A politician who enjoyed the theatre and died because of its convenient darknesses. A celebrated make of car. A town in Lincolnshire, England. A certain colour green.”

“Two lifetimes -- yours and mine.”

“I loved Latin -- the grammar, the difficult tenses, the history -- but for some reason I was very bad at it, shamefully and blushingly bad at it. … In moments of stress the embarrassment of how bad I was at Latin -- a subject I loved -- really hit me. It was like being laughed at by someone you desperately loved.”

“I have always had severe problems with Austrians. … Musical, churchy, uptight… nice legs… hypocritical… authoritarian… always insist their dustbins are very clean.”

“The moods of the dark night skies are variously represented like soft black velvet, like the shining black of a scarab beetle, like the patina-ed surface of Indian-inked paper, soft blotting-paper soaked in dark blue ink for forty days, like a black cat's fur shining in moonlight…”

“Galba… a miserable sort of man… bisexual… fancied mature slaves, especially if they had been a little mutilated… all his freed men had no fingers on the left hands… he's dead -- died screaming… in a cellar.”

“The book to end all books. The final book. After this, there is no more writing, no more publishing.”

“That sounds like a disadvantage.”

“Delivery: A postal or natal event.”

“You could spend a lifetime reading in here.”

“This is the writing of Nagiko Kiyohara no Motosuke Sei Shonagon, and I know you to have blackmailed, violated and humiliated my father. I suspect you also of ruining my husband. You have now committed the greatest crime -- you have desecrated the body of my lover. You and I now know that you have lived long enough.”

“Cosimo: It is only a play… with music? Does God say the same at every death? It is only a play… with music? When I die, will someone say the same? He was only a prince. He died. It was only a play… with music.”

“Money's not interesting -- too easy to get hold of.”

“Jean Renoir once suggested that most true creators have only one idea and spend their lives reworking it, but then very rapidly he added that most people don't have any ideas at all, so one idea is pretty amazing.”

“No. If you don't read, are you safe?”

“I made a very bad mistake; I miscounted these scraps of information on the record as 92, and in continual homage to this man who had been so influential to me, I began creating or constructing my own films on this so-called "magic" number of 92 … but when I eventually made a film about John Cage and met him, I explained this to him, and he found it very amusing because there are only 90 stories on the two sides of the record, and I'd based three years of my filmic career on this mathematical error!”

“The letters Z, O and O dominate the front entrance gates of a capital city zoo. They are made of glass and they tower up two giraffes high. They are the width of one elephant and the colour of bottled blue ink.”

“Only cinema narrows its concern down to its content, that is to its story. It should, instead, concern itself with its form, its structure.”

“Why illustrate a great piece of writing whose very advocacy and evocation and efficacy lies within its very existence as writing?”

“Nun 1: Sir, it is only a play… with music. Do not distress yourself.”

“No -- but I have a feeling your mother was.”

“A little gold and a little charcoal, / A little bone, a little wax. / A little alcohol, a little horror and a little gum. / A little ivory, / a little sulphur, / a little damp dust, / a sluice of fluids.”

“Outside in the garden, the greenhouse collapses. Masonry crashes from the roof and splashes into the moat. The grave-marker for the pig Hortense moves up out of the ground. The Maillol statue stands firm as the shrubs around it quiver. A water-main bursts in the yard sending a shower into the air. Trees fall as though whipped down to the ground. The water on the lake shimmers and ripples like a film run backwards.”

“Cinema is far too rich and capable a medium to be merely left to the storytellers.”

“Later this device of mirror and mirror-carriers will be developed and many changes rung from its possibilities.”

“You have no right to be jealous of a woman who wants to be more of a woman by watching a man dressed up as a woman.”

“It is Vesalius' Anatomy of Birth -- a book of drawings and diagrams of human anatomy. Beautiful drawings but -- as the pages turn -- terrible in their frankness…”

“Raw sex is the last thing you are going to encounter in a Jane Austen woman.”

“No -- that's true. But it's an anniversary I shall always celebrate I shall always celebrate even if you won't. And you won't.”

“It's so miserable and so easy to keep slamming Titanic -- I'll shut up.”

“Then I think you have a choice -- please your mother or face criminal charges.”

“I've always been fascinated by maps and cartography. A map tells you where you've been, where you are, and where you're going -- in a sense it's three tenses in one.”

“French Cuisine. By Guillaume Rosart. Publisher Henri Simonel. In 1950 it cost me twenty francs -- about 2 pounds -- about 15 pounds now.”

“Too late. Too late to retreat. Your heart is open. The book has got you. Your body is wide open. This rat of a book has invaded your privacy, worried its feeling into your entrails by every private passage.”

“There have been innumerable films about film-making, but Otto e Mezzo was a film about the processes of thinking about making a film -- certainly the most enjoyable part of any cinema creation.”

“Words reproduce themselves pleasurably too.”

“The range of human skin colours is quite narrow when you think about it -- and I do -- and subtle -- beige, pink, white, tan, taupe, …”

“Shoes: gloves for the feet.”

“A French critic referred to me as a gay pessimist, with gay used in its older sense, and talked of Cocteau in the same breath.”

“The world is in his cloak -- figures peer out of its folds -- mythological figures and snakes and pigs and flowers, naked fauns and heavy-breasted sirens and horses' heads -- they sprawl on the flagstones at his feet and peep out from under his arms…”

“I don't have any particular wish to be polemical or didactic; I don't have a "message", but what I do thoroughly enjoy are those works of art, not necessarily in the cinema, but in the other arts as well, which have an encyclopaedic world.”

“This is a book and a body that is so warm to the touch. My touch.”

“A long white dress that starts under the breast and travels on interminably down -- so their legs are entirely mysterious -- they could have one leg or two inside that dress… A Jane Austen woman could be incredibly passionate inside that dress.”