Peter Greenaway citations

Page 2

“The cinema is about other things than storytelling. What you remember from a good film -- and let's only talk about good films -- is not the story, but a particular and hopefully unique experience that is about atmosphere, ambience, performance, style, an emotional attitude, gestures, singular events, a particular audio-visual experience that does not rely on the story.”

“Nun 2: (Very quietly) Sir, be grateful for the music. Most of us die in silence.”

“A is for Adam and E is for Eve. B is for bile, blood and bones.”

“Perhaps, sadly, in the end, cinema is only a translator's art, and you know what they say about translators: traitors all.”

“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 was completely absorbed as to what would happen because anything was possible.”

“I have always found them very reasonable --they don't change their minds when you aren't looking at them. Each one can always be relied upon to say the same thing.”

“This drawing is three quarters ball, one quarter philosopher, which might be about the right space to keep a philosopher in his place.”

“On the other hand, I view the whole matter from a cosmic perspective. I don't take a position. I believe that there are no more positions to take, no certainties, no facts. Many people find this confusing about my films; they say I am hiding out behind irony. But from a cosmic viewpoint, it is eternally unimportant whether one lives or not.”

“We all live to a formula. Maybe the secret lies in keeping that formula secret.”

“I'm an excuse for medical experiments and art theory. You must get me out of here and out of the hospital.”

“I cannot keep a clock or a watch. They stop on me. Why won't time stay peacefully on my wrist? Is time not interested in me any more because I am dying?”

“If Good approved of his creature's creation, He breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His name.”

“This book is past the first flush of youth. It is a book that is in puberty. It is hesitating, and from the vantage point of the mature reader, it is both a sad and amusing reminder of the part which is not always attractive enough to be revisited.”

“Dawns and sunsets. The Magic Hour -- when the sun and the moon can be in the sky at the same time -- a magic and disturbing occurrence for a child. And for an adult.”

“And you would never know if she had feet.”

“In one of the rooms of the Fortuny Palace there are eight books from Prospero's Library. They are magical books. In many senses all books are magical.”

“May I keep this book forever. May this book and this body outlast my love. May this book and this body love me as I love its length, its breadth, its thickness, its text, its skin, its letters, its punctuation, its quiet and its noisy pages.”

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

“One of my heroes, almost necessarily from what I'm saying, of course, is Borges, who is a supreme master of doing thing -- being a data bank -- and the beauty of this economy is that he could have written War and Peace in three or four pages; who knows, it might have been a better book.”

“This is where I begin to do the writing. I am now going to be the pen and not the paper.”

“No more. A puff of writing long gone. Is this the child pulling on the flying cloth of its mother's last worn dress?”

“What are you -- some kind of addict? Is this where you come to…”

“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 also think that everyone has an elitist approach to his own art, a complex knowledge of it, whether he is a clockmaker or an engineer. And I think it's perfectly legitimate to make use of this knowledge because it enriches the overall texture of life.”

“The pretence that numbers are not the humble creation of man, but are the exacting language of the Universe and therefore possess the secret of all things, is comforting, terrifying and mesmeric.”

“Alas, despite wing implants, feathers and wax, and carnal associations with swans, we will never grow wings. Alas, any true flight we make will always be externally assisted. Alas, the best we can do is fall and believe ourselves flying.”