Peter Greenaway
Welsh-born English film director.
Outside in the garden, the greenhouse collapses. Masonry crashes from the roof and splashes into the moat. The grave-marker for the pig Hortense moves up out of the ground. The Maillol statue stands firm as the shrubs around it quiver. A water-main bursts in the yard sending a shower into the air. Trees fall as though whipped down to the ground. The water on the lake shimmers and ripples like a film run backwards.
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.
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.
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.
Grief: An emotional experience often brought about by a great sense of loss. The subject of this loss is completely immaterial.
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?
"Rubbish -- absolute rubbish!"
"I once saw a film where the main character didn't speak for the first half hour."
"You could spend a lifetime reading in here."
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.
"Two lifetimes -- yours and mine."
"That sounds like a disadvantage."
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.
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.
You know to make his rigid, tedious, boring paintings seem at least a little human, the Mondrian enthusiasts keep insisting that Mondrian was a great tango dancer.
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.