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Peter Greenaway Quotes

born 1942 Wales

Peter Greenaway CBE (born 5 April 1942) is a Welsh film director.

Wales
Film directors

Random Peter Greenaway quote

160 quotes

You know to make his rigid, tedious, boring paintings seem at least a little human, the Mondrian enthusiasts keep insisting that Mondrian was a great tango dancer.

Inspiration: A miasma originating in the head that pollutes the body and irritates good sense.

Dots [...]: Small marks variously made to indicate infinity, hesitation, duplication, or lack of imagination.

Painting: Once upon a time a painting was a two-dimensional representation; now it is anything its author thinks is appropriate.

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?

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.

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.

"That's all. Thank you. You may go."

A little gold and a little charcoal,
A little bone, a little wax.
A little alcohol, a little horror and a little gum.
A little ivory,
a little sulphur,
a little damp dust,
a sluice of fluids.

Jean Renoir once suggested that most true creators have only one idea and spend their lives reworking it, but then very rapidly he added that most people don't have any ideas at all, so one idea is pretty amazing.

One [film] is based on the Medea myth about a woman who kills her own child -- The Love of Ruins. It is almost a technical exercise to see if I can convince an audience or make an audience sympathetic to a woman who kills her own child.

"It tells you how to boil water. What expression to wear when you are eating eggs. How to starve. When to eat. What your first meal should be. What your last meal should be. It says more about death than eating and more about living than cooking."

Obviously, I am the cook. The cook is the director. He arranges the menu, the seating order of the guests; he gives refuge to the lovers; he prepares the repast of the lover's body. The cook is a perfectionist and a rationalist, a portrait of myself.

Cinema: An illusion that can only satisfactorily happen in the dark.

"Imagine you are sucking the little fingers of a lady... or... no, you wouldn't understand that -- since you'd never get that close to a lady -- who'd want to get that close to you for God's sake?"

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.

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.

Titus... he started well... soon became greedy... disembowelled on the Tiber steps... he's dead, died screaming...

Roy, this is my wife, Georgina Spica -- she has a heart of gold and a body to match... and I am Albert Spica and I have a heart of gold and a great deal of money to match.

It is an awesome sight, repeatedly drawn and painted. How long did it last, this Fall of Angels? Was it all over in an hour? Or did it take days, weeks, years? Is it still going on?

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Peter Greenaway (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.