Peter Greenaway citations

Page 6

“You see how even an illness can be romanticized. Tuberculosis got the treatment: Keats, the Lady of the Camellias, the foggy dew, and so on. We must make romantic literature out of cancer -- can you imagine that?”

“Isn't that why people keep diaries -- to be read by someone else? Why would they keep them otherwise?”

“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.”

“It's like Shelley. Like Werther. Like a Japanese Ophelia. Like a beautiful Oriental Lady in the Lake.”

“To be an atheist you have to have ten thousand times more imagination than if you are a religious fundamentalist. You must take the responsibility to acquire information, digest and use it to understand what you can.”

“Is this a book exhausted from too much reading? Or too little reading?”

“No we mustn't! She'll have us all audited.”

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

“I think it is really important to be in some way provocative -- either intellectually or viscerally -- in the films one makes.”

“I wouldn't be so interested in her fingers.”

“I would be curious about one of those Jane Austen women -- you know -- long-suffering, dutiful -- but all right in the end -- a plump 19th century type, five foot four, ringlets, brown eyes, long fingers.”

“Prospero has always felt most at ease in a study, surrounded by books.”

“When I was young I hated my body because it was so thin -- now I try not to look at it too much because it's so old. There perhaps might have been just six months when I felt comfortable with it -- when I discovered alcohol for the first time and learnt to drive and was fattening out and had just met your mother.”

“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.”

“What quaint English. They make an unpredictable linguistic duo.”

“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.”