Peter Greenaway
Welsh-born English film director.
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?
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.
Look, it was an accident. Five thousand accidents happen every day -- bizarre, tragic, farcical... they're Acts of God fit only to amaze the survivors and irritate the Insurance Company...
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.
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.
It serves the purpose of not serving a purpose, surely quite a valid one.
We all live to a formula. Maybe the secret lies in keeping that formula secret.
Are animals like car-crashes -- Acts of God or mere Accidents -- bizarre, tragic, farcical, plotted nowadays into a scenario by an ingenious storyteller, Mr C Darwin?
"Rubbish -- absolute rubbish!"
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.
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.