Peter Greenaway: Likeness

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Go on. Treat me like the page of a book. Your book.”

Peter Greenaway

Jerome, to Nagiko
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

“… like us? Counting up the minutes -- have we spent half an hour together?”

Peter Greenaway

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

“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

“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.”

Peter Greenaway

Fear of Drowning By Numbers

“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.”

Peter Greenaway

Storey
8 1/2 Women

“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…”

Peter Greenaway

Prospero's Books

“That sounds like a disadvantage.”

Peter Greenaway

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

“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.”

Peter Greenaway

Penultimate paragraph of the published script.
8 1/2 Women

“It is the trajectory of a thrown stone. It follows the hump of a humped-back whale from nose to tail. It's bounded like a smooth, sheep-cropped, grassy hill. It is a graph-line through a grey, blue, and then a grey again, sky.”

Peter Greenaway

Flying Out of This World

“You should be allowed to rub out and start again, it means that you are human. The purists are tedious, they tell you a mistake is like an enduring black mark. Nonsense -- better to be human than some infernal machine never going wrong.”

Peter Greenaway

One of the calligraphers
The Pillow Book

“Prospero wears a large, heavy, dark-blue cloak or gown that enfolds him like a quilted blanket… it is darkly embroidered with small wine-coloured beads and swirls of black vegetation… it has long strings and ornate tassels that trail to the ground… it is a garment that has often been worn… a little frayed and scuffed. Later it will be seen to be capable of changing colour… in seven stages comparable to the power of Prospero's magic… black, brown, dark blue, light blue, purple, dark red and fiery red… and to have a vivid lining embroidered with dazzling stars -- a lining that is only revealed in flashes as when a dark butterfly momentarily uncovers coloured underwings.”

Peter Greenaway

Prospero's Books