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Peter Greenaway

272 quotes

“Nun 2: (Very quietly) Sir, be grateful for the music. Most of us die in silence.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a shy client who uses invisible ink on Nagiko's body to hide his obvious talent. The woman attempts to develop the invisible ink by bathing in warm water, by standing as close as she dare to a hot fire, by washing her body in the juice of onion-skins until the onions make her weep and her tears prove to be the necessary solvent to reveal the writing.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Isn't that why people keep diaries -- to be read by someone else? Why would they keep them otherwise?”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Farewells can be both beautiful and despicable. Saying farewell to one who is loved is very complicated.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The word for smoke should look like smoke -- the word for rain should look like rain...”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My brother works for a forestry commission. He writes only in green ink to persuade his bosses to make it a standard ecological colour for all forestry business. I asked him what colour ink he would use if he gave up eating whale meat and worked for a whaling company. He said whales were colour blind.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What are you -- some kind of addict? Is this where you come to...”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perhaps. I need writing. Don't ask me why -- just take out your pen and write your name on my arm -- go on.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You can't write. That's not writing. It's scribbling. Distasteful scribbling. Why can't you write properly?”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Go on. Treat me like the page of a book. Your book.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is where I begin to do the writing. I am now going to be the pen and not the paper.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His writing -- in so many languages -- made me a sign-post pointing east, west, north and south. I had shoes in German, stockings in French, gloves in Hebrew, a hat with a veil in Italian. He only kept me naked where I was most accustomed to wearing clothes.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am certain that there are two things in life which are dependable -- the delights of the flesh and the delights of literature. I have had the good fortune to bring them together and enjoy them together in full quantity.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nagiko, I am waiting for you. Meet me at the library. Any library. Every library. Yours, Jerome.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Jerome never liked me -- preferred my sister who was a little fool excited by modern literature -- all swear-words and scatology -- before it became fashionable.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She picks up the baby and contemplates the Bonsai-bush, and, as we watch, in the growing half-dark, the Bonsai-bush flowers. On the black-and-white film, the thousands of flower-petals blush a deep red.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On the same day as I started to keep my own pillow-book -- I met my future husband for the first time. I was six, he was ten. We did not exchange a word. He had been hand-picked by my father's publisher.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Nagiko's journal for Sep 16 1993
“I married. I became a wife. I acquired a husband. I had a ceremonial wedding in style. Whichever way you say it -- it was bound to end badly.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Nagiko's journal for Feb 12 1990
“We went to Kyoto -- back to Japan -- to work in the Matsuo Tiasha shrine which Sei Shonagon had visited regularly. I couldn't give up such an opportunity. I was also a little homesick. We didn't finish walking the cat-walk until midnight when all the audience had gone. I didn't mind -- Sei Shonagon had watched the moon rise in that garden a thousand years ago -- I could have walked up and down that path all night long.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) first seen 1997 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Nagiko's journal for Nov 9 1997
“I want to describe the Body as a Book, a Book as a Body, and this Body and this Book will be the first Volume of Thirteen Volumes.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This book has neither the virtue of irony nor deserves the sympathy reserved for the truly mad.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Is this a book exhausted from too much reading? Or too little reading?”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The major sweep of this book's living is too often marred by qualifying. It is hedged about with ifs and buts and if onlys and howevers, excuses for a life that is about to shut its covers for the last time and then crumple into dust in an unseen and never-to-be-remembered library.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Each word is pumped up with consonant cholesterol. It's full of fat words. The pages cream with subcutaneous fat. New letters are gilded like showy teeth, making comprehension constipated and exorbitantly metalled.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This book is gaudy like a gilded cauliflower which smells so bad after a good hot water soaking, like hot chocolate sweetened with sugar beet / incompatibles blended incongruously to no purpose.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is a book and a body that is so warm to the touch. My touch.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This book and I have become indivisible. I have placed my feet on this book's last pages, confident of standing so much higher in the world than I ever stood before.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The pages are so harmonious in their proportion / disharmony in the contents is impossible.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If Good approved of his creature's creation, He breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His name.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Where is a book before it is born? Does a book grow like a tree? Who are a book's parents? Does a book need two parents -- a mother and a father? Can a book be born inside another book? And where is the parent book of books?”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you were not to be its victim, this book and body would amuse you with its arrogance. It would make you laugh. Because you were not its victim, you could feel no pain of betrayal.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Too late. Too late to retreat. Your heart is open. The book has got you. Your body is wide open. This rat of a book has invaded your privacy, worried its feeling into your entrails by every private passage.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Blind eyes cannot read.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A hand cannot write on itself.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Itch to read, scratch to understand.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Investigation is never complete.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Words reproduce themselves pleasurably too.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whispering can be a rest from a noisy world of words.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Death is not necessarily an old and withered book with dry pages. It can be a thousand leaves of strong and shining text on a powerful body, held erect on the vertebrae of a strong spine. The heart hardly breathes because quietus has been reached, the torso is like a rock, the legs are rooted, the ink is dependable. If the words of death should be considered faded and sere -- where could be the dignity in dying?”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The book to end all books. The final book. After this, there is no more writing, no more publishing.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is the writing of Nagiko Kiyohara no Motosuke Sei Shonagon, and I know you to have blackmailed, violated and humiliated my father. I suspect you also of ruining my husband. You have now committed the greatest crime -- you have desecrated the body of my lover. You and I now know that you have lived long enough.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In practically every film you experience, you can see the director following the text. Illustrating the words first, making the pictures after, and, alas, so often not making pictures at all, but holding up the camera to do its mimetic worst.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“John Cage, composer, painter, and all-round thinker and cultural catalyst, said that if you introduce twenty percent of novelty into any artwork, watch out -- you are going to lose eighty percent of your audience at once. He said you would lose them for fifteen years. Cage was interested in fifteen-year cycles. But he was hopelessly optimistic. The general appreciation, for example, of Western painting has got stuck around Impressionism, and that was 130 years ago, not fifteen years ago.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source