Since the earliest days of my filmmaking, I wrote such short stories, indeed very short stories: sometimes two or three sentences, perhaps a paragraph. There are now close to a thousand stories, and I have the distinct sense they will not stop coming. Some found their way into my early short films - stories spoken directly to the camera in H is for House and Vertical Features Remake - and sometimes they provided the very architecture of a film, as in Dear Phone. They also spill, extravagantly, into the encyclopaedic three hours of The Falls. Over ;me, the stories have multiplied, touching on almost everything that occupies me. Certain subjects return insistently: painters and paintings, birds and natural history, anatomy, Rome and the Romans, the Netherlands and the Dutch. Darwin, Rembrandt, and Henry VIII reoccur. And stories about stories are endless.

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover was built on the courses of a dinner, while another script imagines an old man writing a hundred stories about the towers of a city - a structure that allows me to speak of death, loss, human hubris, ageing, mortality, and euthanasia. Whether this will ever find its way into film remains uncertain. Together with the artist, painter, and illustrator Stefano Bessoni, we present a collection of my stories accompanied by his drawings. And so, we have begun. Peter Greenaway.