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I married. I became a wife. I acquired a husband. I had a ceremonial wedding in style. Whichever way you say it - it was bound to end badly.
Peter Greenaway -
I want to be a prime creator - as every self-regarding artist should do.
Peter Greenaway
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Cinema ceases to be passive and becomes active: you, the audience, are now, in some senses, in charge of the filmmaking process. You have all got mobile phones, you have all got cam recorders, and you've all got laptops, so you're all filmmakers.
Peter Greenaway -
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.
Peter Greenaway -
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.
Peter Greenaway -
Dawns and sunsets. The Magic Hour - when the sun and the moon can be in the sky at the same time - a magic and disturbing occurrence for a child. And for an adult.
Peter Greenaway -
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.
Peter Greenaway -
The major sweep of this book's living is too often marred by qualifying. It is hedged about with ifs and buts and if onlys and howevers, excuses for a life that is about to shut its covers for the last time and then crumple into dust in an unseen and never-to-be-remembered library.
Peter Greenaway
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Human relationships are patterned and cross-patterned and restricted and limited and de-limited and caged and freed again by the elaborate conventions, rules, and games we call Civilisation … the rules and the games are often absurd and farcical - sometimes they are tragic - yet we tacitly acknowledge that they are necessary.
Peter Greenaway -
Secret: A private matter whispered abroad and never kept to oneself. By naming it a secret, we immediately indicate its presence. If we really wanted to keep secrets, we would not have a name for them.
Peter Greenaway -
Esmerelda, the grieving widow, continues to burn and scream. In our minds we rush to save her from the consuming flames. But cannot.
Peter Greenaway -
Later this device of mirror and mirror-carriers will be developed and many changes rung from its possibilities.
Peter Greenaway -
The start of a film is like a gateway, a formal entrance-point. The first three minutes of a film make great demands on an audience's patience and credulity. A great deal has to be learnt very rapidly about place and attitude, character and intent and ambition.
Peter Greenaway -
Thanks to secondary education and the Internet, we're all knowledgeable now - if knowledge means the accumulation of facts. Curators are those who know how to maneuver around that knowledge.
Peter Greenaway
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I suppose I am gently cynical about notions of who we think we are, but I certainly don't hate my fellow man. I think my cinema, although it might often deal with death and decay, is highly celebratory.
Peter Greenaway -
Whispering can be a rest from a noisy world of words.
Peter Greenaway -
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.
Peter Greenaway -
It is a most unexpected Earthquake in Geneva.
Peter Greenaway -
All this takes many clumsy and inexact word-descriptions to describe, but if we read paintings like we read books, it would not be such a hidden language for painting can effortlessly produce such elegant solutions.
Peter Greenaway -
The range of human skin colours is quite narrow when you think about it - and I do - and subtle - beige, pink, white, tan, taupe, ...
Peter Greenaway
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I suppose I have a concern for this extraordinary, beautiful, amazing, exciting, taxonomically brilliant world that we live in, but we keep fucking it up all the time.
Peter Greenaway -
A man bringing himself, melody and mathematics into perfect and enviable proportions. / only more so, much more so.
Peter Greenaway -
'We must ask Kito to come over.'
Peter Greenaway -
'What good are all these books to you? You can't eat them! How can they make you happy?'
Peter Greenaway