Peter Greenaway
Welsh-born English film director.
Titus... he started well... soon became greedy... disembowelled on the Tiber steps... he's dead, died screaming...
... 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.
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.
Perhaps, sadly, in the end, cinema is only a translator's art, and you know what they say about translators: traitors all.
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.
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.
Gonzalo threw many books into the bottom of the leaky vessel that took Prospero out on to the sea away from Italy and Europe into exile. Shakespeare does not, of course, elaborate what these volumes were. Prospero's Books speculates. There would need perhaps to be books on navigation and survival, there would need to be books for an elderly scholar to learn how to rear and educate a young daughter, how to colonise an island, farm it, subjugate its inhabitants, identify its plants and husband its wild beasts. There would need to be books to offer solace and advise patience and put past glory and present despondency into perspective. There would need to be books to encourage revenge.
I don't know what to say really -- except that you look immortal and I look bereft.
Go on. Treat me like the page of a book. Your book.
"Too many stupid people have it."
Smut is a target for reconstructed cricketing accidents -- he is the Cricket Saint Sebastian.
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.
Painting: Once upon a time a painting was a two-dimensional representation; now it is anything its author thinks is appropriate.
Taup? What sort of colour is "taup"? It sounds like a Malaysian ground sloth encountered once every fifty years by one of the Attenboroughs wearing long socks.
Nun 2: (Very quietly) Sir, be grateful for the music. Most of us die in silence.
Investigation is never complete.
"You weren't asleep then."
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.
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.
Why illustrate a great piece of writing whose very advocacy and evocation and efficacy lies within its very existence as writing?