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Peter Greenaway
272 quotes
“It seems to me that the comprehension and enjoyment of the reader, as opposed to the viewer, is best served in printing this version rather than a slavish definitive transcription. Besides, what film is truly definitive? By the time you see the film it may very well be sub-titled, re-edited, shortened, even censored, and every film is viewed at the discretion of the projectionist, the cinema manager, the architect of the cinema, the comfort of your seat and the attention of your neighbour.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It could be said now that all animals live in zoos, whether it is a zoo in Regent's Park, London or a Nigerian Game Reserve. Perhaps what's left to argue is only the zoo's quality.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Cinema is far too rich and capable a medium to be merely left to the storytellers.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The letters Z, O and O dominate the front entrance gates of a capital city zoo. They are made of glass and they tower up two giraffes high. They are the width of one elephant and the colour of bottled blue ink.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The large body of the swan wedged in the shattered glass of the car windscreen fills the film frame. Its head is bent back on itself in a parody of its orthodox gracefulness.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Look, it was an accident. Five thousand accidents happen every day -- bizarre, tragic, farcical... they're Acts of God fit only to amaze the survivors and irritate the Insurance Company...”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm an excuse for medical experiments and art theory. You must get me out of here and out of the hospital.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I sit here for hours. It's like sitting amongst lighthouses, each lighthouse giving you a bearing on lost spaces of time...”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]here are tens of thousands of photographs taken here, all taken very patiently, because decay can be very slow.. Ten months for a human body... they say...”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sir Isaac Newton, the subject of this cake, is in every Englishman's wallet... he's on the English one-pound note. I always carry one on me for good luck. A man who discovered gravity and thus successfully secured our feet on the ground is a good companion. In fixing us to the earth, he enabled us -- with equanimity -- to permit our heads to remain in the clouds.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That's all. Thank you. You may go.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Is that really all?”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What else could there be?”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Titus... he started well... soon became greedy... disembowelled on the Tiber steps... he's dead, died screaming...”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hadrian... as you know an architect of note... put a lot of faith in stones... died peacefully... planning a Temple to Wisdom... still, he's dead. Nero -- best not to talk about him -- burnt Rome, caused untold misery, deserved to die; died screaming in a summerhouse.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is some comfort to be had in contemplating the folly of so many dead, don't you think? … and more comfort still in contemplating the continuity.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We all live to a formula. Maybe the secret lies in keeping that formula secret.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the game of Dawn Card-Castles, fifty-two playing cards are stacked up into a castle in a draught-free space: the player can determine the dreams of the next night if he awakes before the castle collapses. Those players who wish to dream of Romance build their castle with the seven of hearts.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The game Flights of Fancy or Reverse Strip Jump is played from as high a jumping-point as a competitor will dare. After each successful jump, the competitor is allowing to put on an article of clothing. Thirteen jumps is normally more than enough to see a competitor fully dressed for the day.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sheep are especially sensitive to the exact moment of the turn of the tide. In this game, nine tethered sheep react, pull on the stakes, jolt the chairs and rattle the tea-cups. Bets are taken on the combined sensitivity of any three lines of sheep -- read vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. Since there are normally three tide-turns every twenty-four hours, it is normal practice to take the best of three results. Reliable clocks, calendars, and time-tables are used to determine the accuracy of the sheep's forecast.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A great many things are dying very violently all the time. The best days for violent deaths are Tuesdays. They are the yellow-paint days. Saturdays are second best -- or worst. Saturdays are red-paint days. The Great Death Game is therefore a contest between red-paint days and yellow-paint days. So far yellow-paint days are winning by thirty-one corpses to twenty-nine. Whatever the colour, a violent death is always celebrated by a firework.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If a player in the game of Deadman's Catch drops a skittle, he is obliged to suffer a succession of handicaps. First to catch using one hand, then to catch kneeling on one knee, then on two knees, then with one eye closed. If a player finally drops a catch with both eyes closed, then he is out and must take his place in the winding-sheet.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The game of Bees in the Trees is a variant of musical chairs and is best played with funeral music and in the open air. The object of the game is to sit down on a vacant chair when the music stops. If the chair sat in is occupied by bees, it is permissible to arrange a professional foul.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Endgame: "The object of this game is to dare to fall with a noose around your neck from a place sufficiently off the ground such that a fall will hang you. The object of the game is to punish those who have caused great unhappiness by their selfish actions. This is the best game of all because the winner is also the loser and the judge's decision is always final.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Human relationships are patterned and cross-patterned and restricted and limited and de-limited and caged and freed again by the elaborate conventions, rules, and games we call Civilisation … the rules and the games are often absurd and farcical -- sometimes they are tragic -- yet we tacitly acknowledge that they are necessary.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Counting is the most simple and primitive of narratives -- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 -- a tale with a beginning, a middle and an end and a sense of progression -- arriving at a finish of two digits -- a goal attained, a dénouement reached.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Counting makes even hideous events bearable as simply more of the same -- the counting of wedding-rings, spectacles, teeth and bodies disassociates them from their context -- to make the ultimate obscene blasphemy of bureaucratic insensitivity. Engage the mind with numbing recitation to make it empty of reaction.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All this could be enough -- we would leave an Impressionist painting at this stage -- probably much earlier -- and leave it possibly with great satisfaction.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no obligation for the author of a film to believe in, or to sympathise with, the moral behaviour of his characters. Nor is he necessarily to be accredited with the same opinions as his characters. Nor is it necessary or obligatory for him to believe in the tenet of his construction -- all of which is a disclaimer to the notion that the author of Drowning by Numbers believes that all men are weak, enfeebled, loutish, boorish and generally inadequate and incompetent as partners for women. But it's a thought.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As for the girl -- the child of a prostitute -- what of her future? A life of prostitution in a gaudy dress -- pretending to be Nell Gwynne, the Protestant whore? No -- out of her mother's earnings she will go to University and study to become an astronomer. Charles II made his mistress Nell Gwynne an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1674.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Smut is a target for reconstructed cricketing accidents -- he is the Cricket Saint Sebastian.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Two children die. An accident and a suicide amongst so many murders. A chance death and a death of self-recrimination. Smut and the Skipping Girl have been aping their parents and elders -- perhaps they could now teach them a lesson -- all the machinations and game-playing and adjusting for sexual and emotional positioning is not worth the effort.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A final word. Drowning by Numbers is a story of three women who murder their husbands -- one in a bath, one in the sea and one in a swimming pool. It is a black and ironic fairy-tale for adults, half invented by children who are innocently obsessed with sex and death -- especially death. It is a poetic, amoral tale told morally to support the belief that the good are seldom rewarded, the bad go largely unpunished and the innocent are always abused.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As author in control of the plot I can choose and dictate the fall-out of events from any number of infinite possibilities -- which is a very volatile state of affairs, suggesting the ephemerality of fictional narrative. I can choose to have seven characters and kill six of them off in the first five minutes. I can have seventy characters and squash them under a fallen rock, make them copulate with beasts, sit them on the moon or turn their hair white. This casual condition of authorship is irresponsible.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the film The Belly of an Architect, an architect from Chicago organizes an exhibition of his favourite architect Etienne-Lous Boullée (1728-1799). I wrote an account of this hypothetical exhibition as though it had been seen by an unlikely Boullée contemporary -- Jane Austen (1775-1817). She made a prim but perceptive account of her progress through the corridors and halls of the Vittoriano in the centre of Rome -- a building constructed long after both of these eminent personages were dead.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In an interview in Die Zeit, 24 Nov 1989
“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.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wouldn't be so interested in her fingers.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source