Peter Greenaway: Likeness

“The start of a film is like a gateway, a formal entrance-point. The first three minutes of a film make great demands on an audience's patience and credulity. A great deal has to be learnt very rapidly about place and attitude, character and intent and ambition.”

“Where is a book before it is born? Does a book grow like a tree? Who are a book's parents? Does a book need two parents -- a mother and a father? Can a book be born inside another book? And where is the parent book of books?”

“This book is gaudy like a gilded cauliflower which smells so bad after a good hot water soaking, like hot chocolate sweetened with sugar beet / incompatibles blended incongruously to no purpose.”

“Death is not necessarily an old and withered book with dry pages. It can be a thousand leaves of strong and shining text on a powerful body, held erect on the vertebrae of a strong spine. The heart hardly breathes because quietus has been reached, the torso is like a rock, the legs are rooted, the ink is dependable. If the words of death should be considered faded and sere -- where could be the dignity in dying?”

“At once, far off… begins a rumbling, droning noise -- like a thousand distant flying machines -- like the sound of an armada of mechanical birds -- a noise reminiscent of implacable, massive stage machinery in a masque or pageant that is several streets away. It is not one sound but many sounds combined. This is the sound of Prospero's magic.”

“I like sleeping. (after a pause) You were conceived in this bed.”

“I invariably, after great familiarity with a film, concoct a personal way of reading it that relies entirely on information which a public audience would, I feel, have scant interest. I might travel from a casual unrehearsed glance of a minor character to a detail of folded cloth, from a rhyme in the dialogue to an over-excited high note in the music, from a misplaced shadow to a patch of rogue colour, from a shine on a furniture leg to a curious accidental photographic haze around a street lamp, from the examination of a cloud that looks like a snail to the discomfort of an actress who I know is stifling a sneeze.”

“That's just the sort of remark you would make -- you'd just be intent on whipping it in, whipping it out, and wiping it on your jacket! Look at your jacket! Looks like a pig field! Your nails could do with a clean. Show me your nails! God! Why can't I have some bloody quality in my associates?”

“I sit here for hours. It's like sitting amongst lighthouses, each lighthouse giving you a bearing on lost spaces of time…”

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

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

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”