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Peter Greenaway
272 quotes
“Leaving slowly, / sucking in cold air round a warm tongue, / ennui synchronized to the pulse, / reports from a coiled trachea, / It is only irregular clocks...”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A man bringing himself, melody and mathematics into perfect and enviable proportions. / only more so, much more so.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is the trajectory of a thrown stone. It follows the hump of a humped-back whale from nose to tail. It's bounded like a smooth, sheep-cropped, grassy hill. It is a graph-line through a grey, blue, and then a grey again, sky.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A thrown-stone trajectory is a good metaphor for so many phenomena: the curve of an event, any event; the curve of a life, any life; the curve of a hypothesis; the curve experienced in the manufacture of a work of art; the curve of interest experienced in the manufacture of a catalogue.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This drawing is three quarters ball, one quarter philosopher, which might be about the right space to keep a philosopher in his place.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Atlas, the man who carries the world, becomes the book of the maps of the world. An example of man, or God, into book. Few have that honour.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now, at this very minute, another thing is happening which we cannot hear because most paintings do not have a sound-track. Peter is inventing the word "simony" to explain ecclesiastical purchase-power, for which, since his Church later exercised it so expertly, Simon Magus ought to be revered as a patron not a rogue.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No more. A puff of writing long gone. Is this the child pulling on the flying cloth of its mother's last worn dress?”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sappho was a worshipper of the Aphrodite cult and on the island of Lesbos there were many cliff-jumpers. They all jumped. Some may say they flew in ecstasy. If only for nine seconds -- one second for each string of the lyre.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Esmerelda, the grieving widow, continues to burn and scream. In our minds we rush to save her from the consuming flames. But cannot.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The floorboards point in parallel lines to a vanishing point that does not concern us -- somewhere beyond the opera house, across the streets, across the houses of the suburbs, all the way to a hypothetical single dot... on the sea's horizon. Far from this sour drama.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Four soiled bedsheets sewn together to make a screen. One for spittle. One for urine. One for semen. One for blood. All for tears.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How can an opera express this complicated question of bedsheets?”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Are these clues? Which ones are important? Which ones are incidental? Which ones are circumstantial?”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Blood: A red substance believed to be capable of supporting life but which in a theatrical drama invariably indicates death.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Cinema: An illusion that can only satisfactorily happen in the dark.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Cleverness: A predisposition to irritate excessively.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Delivery: A postal or natal event.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dots [...]: Small marks variously made to indicate infinity, hesitation, duplication, or lack of imagination.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Grief: An emotional experience often brought about by a great sense of loss. The subject of this loss is completely immaterial.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Inspiration: A miasma originating in the head that pollutes the body and irritates good sense.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Orchestra: Anagram of carthorse.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Painting: Once upon a time a painting was a two-dimensional representation; now it is anything its author thinks is appropriate.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Secret: A private matter whispered abroad and never kept to oneself. By naming it a secret, we immediately indicate its presence. If we really wanted to keep secrets, we would not have a name for them.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Shoes: gloves for the feet.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Cinema is dead. I can give you a date - it died on the 31st of September, 1983, when the zapper or the remote control was introduced to the livings rooms of the world. Bang! That's the end.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are only two subjects that matters, one is sex and the other is death, what else we could talk about it. And most the cinema talks all the time about sex and death. And my cinema deals with sex and death so... ¿what's the problem?".”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with El Tiempo in Bogotá, Colombia. October 2008
“What initially attracted me to The Seventh Seal was that it had values and characteristics which I was familiar with in other art forms, most notably, the European novel and certain forms on English drama, and indeed, in relation to my rather academic interest in history -- not "history" in the normal sense, but history as a form of entertainment. It might be a very unfashionable view but I believe that history is an amazing bank or reserve area of plots, characterisations, extraordinary events, etc.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't have any particular wish to be polemical or didactic; I don't have a "message", but what I do thoroughly enjoy are those works of art, not necessarily in the cinema, but in the other arts as well, which have an encyclopaedic world.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I made a very bad mistake; I miscounted these scraps of information on the record as 92, and in continual homage to this man who had been so influential to me, I began creating or constructing my own films on this so-called "magic" number of 92 … but when I eventually made a film about John Cage and met him, I explained this to him, and he found it very amusing because there are only 90 stories on the two sides of the record, and I'd based three years of my filmic career on this mathematical error!”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It seems to me that dominant cinema seems to require an empathy or a sympathy between the film and the audience which is basically to do with the manipulation of the emotions and it seems to me again -- and this is a very subjective position -- that most cinema seems to trivialise the emotions, sentimentalising or romanticising them.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You don't go into the National Gallery of any famous capital city and cry, sob, laugh, fall about on the floor, become very angry -- it's a completely different reaction. It's a reaction which is to do with a much more composed sense of regarding an image; it's a reaction with a thought process as opposed to an immediate emotional reaction.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All my films are somewhat experimental, they are all, each one, taking a certain amount of risk, but there's always the basic assumption that we should be able to appreciate the cinema as much with the mind as we can through emotional empathy. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think it is really important to be in some way provocative -- either intellectually or viscerally -- in the films one makes.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think that films or indeed any art work should be made in a way that they are infinitely viewable; so that you could go back to it time and time again, not necessarily immediately but over a space of time, and see new things in it, or new ways of looking at it.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Film is such an extraordinary rich medium which can handle so many different modes of operation, combining together in the same place all these extraordinary disciplines which may be executed in their own right -- music, writing, picture making of all kinds, and I often feel that some filmmakers make films with one eye closed and two hands tied behind their backs.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Finally we hit upon the old cathedral of Amsterdam, which belongs to the Reformed Church and which we remodeled. The owners gave us permission, on certain financial conditions, to shoot the film there. Before that, we had planned to use the cathedral of Cologne, but two days before we began our preparations, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover was shown on German television and the archbishop immediately forbade us from entering the cathedral site!”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From an interview in Positif, January 1994
“It's so miserable and so easy to keep slamming Titanic -- I'll shut up.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In an interview in The Guardian, 26 Oct 1998
“It's precisely on the Internet that the majority of the writing is terribly bad and uninteresting.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In an interview in Page, May 1999
“I was continually connected with the whole world and never got any rest. At the moment, I spend only a few hours weekly on the net, that's just better for me.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In an interview in Page, May 1999
“Only cinema narrows its concern down to its content, that is to its story. It should, instead, concern itself with its form, its structure.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In an interview in Zoom, 16 Nov 1988
“That comes from most people having an American film model in their heads which is nothing but a total illusionary masturbatory massage.”
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
“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.”
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
“As you probably know, I'm often accused of intellectual exhibitionism and all forms of elitism. Although I can understand this point of view, it's a rather wasted argument because, if we regard areas of information as being elite and therefore somehow not usable, it means our centre-ground of activity becomes very, very impoverished.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In an interview in the Washington DC City Paper, 6 Apr 1990
“These ideas are present in all sorts of unrelated cultures -- the Easter Islands, Celtic mythology, Plato's Symposium with its notion that we are all originally hermaphrodite. We became too arrogant and so the gods split us down the middle, forcing us to spend our lives chasing our other half. If we start being arrogant all over again, God will come down and split each half in half, and it will take four people to assemble a fifth, making our lives peculiarly, desperately difficult.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In an interview in the Washington DC City Paper, 6 Apr 1990
“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.”
Peter Greenaway (born 1942) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In an interview in the Washington DC City Paper, 6 Apr 1990