Peter Greenaway Quotes

When I was young I hated my body because it was so thin -- now I try not to look at it too much because it's so old. There perhaps might have been just six months when I felt comfortable with it -- when I discovered alcohol for the first time and learnt to drive and was fattening out and had just met your mother.

Dots [...]: Small marks variously made to indicate infinity, hesitation, duplication, or lack of imagination.

There is a shy client who uses invisible ink on Nagiko's body to hide his obvious talent. The woman attempts to develop the invisible ink by bathing in warm water, by standing as close as she dare to a hot fire, by washing her body in the juice of onion-skins until the onions make her weep and her tears prove to be the necessary solvent to reveal the writing.

Raw sex is the last thing you are going to encounter in a Jane Austen woman.

Words reproduce themselves pleasurably too.

Get the Titanic sailing correctly before you worry about the deck chairs.

Obviously, I am the cook. The cook is the director. He arranges the menu, the seating order of the guests; he gives refuge to the lovers; he prepares the repast of the lover's body. The cook is a perfectionist and a rationalist, a portrait of myself.

A is for Adam and E is for Eve. B is for bile, blood and bones.

What are you -- some kind of addict? Is this where you come to...

Grief: An emotional experience often brought about by a great sense of loss. The subject of this loss is completely immaterial.

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.

What good are all these books to you? You can't eat them! How can they make you happy?

I have always had severe problems with Austrians. … Musical, churchy, uptight... nice legs... hypocritical... authoritarian... always insist their dustbins are very clean.

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?

It seems to me that the comprehension and enjoyment of the reader, as opposed to the viewer, is best served in printing this version rather than a slavish definitive transcription. Besides, what film is truly definitive? By the time you see the film it may very well be sub-titled, re-edited, shortened, even censored, and every film is viewed at the discretion of the projectionist, the cinema manager, the architect of the cinema, the comfort of your seat and the attention of your neighbour.