Peter Greenaway Quotes

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

Delivery: A postal or natal event.

Cleverness: A predisposition to irritate excessively.

Cinema: An illusion that can only satisfactorily happen in the dark.

Blood: A red substance believed to be capable of supporting life but which in a theatrical drama invariably indicates death.

Are these clues? Which ones are important? Which ones are incidental? Which ones are circumstantial?

How can an opera express this complicated question of bedsheets?

Four soiled bedsheets sewn together to make a screen. One for spittle. One for urine. One for semen. One for blood. All for tears.

The floorboards point in parallel lines to a vanishing point that does not concern us -- somewhere beyond the opera house, across the streets, across the houses of the suburbs, all the way to a hypothetical single dot... on the sea's horizon. Far from this sour drama.

Esmerelda, the grieving widow, continues to burn and scream. In our minds we rush to save her from the consuming flames. But cannot.

Sappho was a worshipper of the Aphrodite cult and on the island of Lesbos there were many cliff-jumpers. They all jumped. Some may say they flew in ecstasy. If only for nine seconds -- one second for each string of the lyre.

No more. A puff of writing long gone. Is this the child pulling on the flying cloth of its mother's last worn dress?

Now, at this very minute, another thing is happening which we cannot hear because most paintings do not have a sound-track. Peter is inventing the word "simony" to explain ecclesiastical purchase-power, for which, since his Church later exercised it so expertly, Simon Magus ought to be revered as a patron not a rogue.

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?

Atlas, the man who carries the world, becomes the book of the maps of the world. An example of man, or God, into book. Few have that honour.