Peter Greenaway Quotes - Page 5

It's so miserable and so easy to keep slamming Titanic -- I'll shut up.

All the material is fictional and develops its own eight and a half private, coelesced journeys, where, perhaps not unexpectedly, the females can run faster than the men and trade their freedoms by exhausting the male sexual fantasies and replacing them by some of their own.

Whispering can be a rest from a noisy world of words.

Words reproduce themselves pleasurably too.

I have transmitted genetic material, all I have to do between my daughters' birth and my death is to decorate my life.

I do indeed think that cinema is mortal. There is a lot of evidence already that it is dying on its feet.

This is where I begin to do the writing. I am now going to be the pen and not the paper.

It serves the purpose of not serving a purpose, surely quite a valid one.

English culture is highly literary-based.

We all know that we're going to die, but we don't know when. That's not a blessing, that's a curse.

The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.

I've always been fascinated by Eisenstein.

A French critic referred to me as a gay pessimist, with gay used in its older sense, and talked of Cocteau in the same breath.

If Good approved of his creature's creation, He breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His name.

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.

A hand cannot write on itself.

Blind eyes cannot read.

My second Christian name is John. Good solid bourgeois Christian name, like my first name, Peter, a rock. Minerals. Build on rock, rocks, uranium. Peter and John were two of the twelve apostles - arguable the two most significant. Were my parents hedging their bets?

That comes from most people having an American film model in their heads which is nothing but a total illusionary masturbatory massage.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.