Peter Greenaway: Likeness

Peter Greenaway is British film director. Explore interesting quotes on likeness.
Peter Greenaway: 532 quotes4 likes

“… [I] would certainly like to work with Dennehy again. When he was presented with the script he didn't know me from Adam, and why should he, small-time eccentric, esoteric Englishman that I am?”

Peter Greenaway

In an interview in Sight and Sound, Summer 1987
Interviews

“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.”

Peter Greenaway

Watching Water

“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?”

Peter Greenaway

From the seventh book, "The Book of Youth"
The Pillow Book

“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.”

Peter Greenaway

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

“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?”

Peter Greenaway

From the thirteenth book, "The Book of the Dead"
The Pillow Book

“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.”

Peter Greenaway

Prospero's Books

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

Peter Greenaway

8 1/2 Women

“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.”

Peter Greenaway

Watching Water

“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?”

Peter Greenaway

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

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

Peter Greenaway

A Zed and Two Noughts

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

Peter Greenaway

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

“ "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 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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