Peter Greenaway on Humor

"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."

"The film begins with a visual list of eight and a half Japanese Pachinko Parlours filmed in several Japanese cities -- Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto."

"Nun 1: Sir, it is only a play... with music. Do not distress yourself."

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

"If you were not to be its victim, this book and body would amuse you with its arrogance. It would make you laugh. Because you were not its victim, you could feel no pain of betrayal."

"I never go to the cinema. I can't stand sitting in the dark with strangers -- all of us obliged to share the same emotional experiences -- it's too intimate. I like to be emotional in private."

"… and within five minutes I'd lost interest."

"Imagine a world without a fixed point."

"Each word is pumped up with consonant cholesterol. It's full of fat words. The pages cream with subcutaneous fat. New letters are gilded like showy teeth, making comprehension constipated and exorbitantly metalled."

"A woman materialises behind Prospero -- leaning lightly on the back of his chair -- she is alternately a Titianesque nude and then the Vesalius figure -- flayed … she leans lightly over and kisses Prospero on the cheek. The kiss leaves a blood-red mark on his withered cheek. Prospero shivers."

"The predominant colour of the kitchen -- its walls, cupboards, floor, shelves -- with all the ancillary rooms -- pantries, larders, cold stores, and sculleries, is green -- Hooker's dark green, leaf-green, emerald, faded turquoise, and eau-de-nile -- like the colours of a dark wet jungle."

"You don't go into the National Gallery of any famous capital city and cry, sob, laugh, fall about on the floor, become very angry -- it's a completely different reaction. It's a reaction which is to do with a much more composed sense of regarding an image; it's a reaction with a thought process as opposed to an immediate emotional reaction."

"Film is such an extraordinary rich medium which can handle so many different modes of operation, combining together in the same place all these extraordinary disciplines which may be executed in their own right -- music, writing, picture making of all kinds, and I often feel that some filmmakers make films with one eye closed and two hands tied behind their backs."