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This is a book and a body that is so warm to the touch. My touch.
Peter Greenaway -
May I keep this book forever. May this book and this body outlast my love. May this book and this body love me as I love its length, its breadth, its thickness, its text, its skin, its letters, its punctuation, its quiet and its noisy pages.
Peter Greenaway
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I sit here for hours. It's like sitting amongst lighthouses, each lighthouse giving you a bearing on lost spaces of time...
Peter Greenaway -
Book #10: A Book of Travellers' Tales. As it hits the water its pages detach themselves from the covers, which sink... and the pages form themselves into small paper boats that float away on the tide.
Peter Greenaway -
Only cinema narrows its concern down to its content, that is to its story. It should, instead, concern itself with its form, its structure.
Peter Greenaway -
'Georgie doesn't like babies do you Georgie? Some days, Georgie, I think you behave like a bloke.'
Peter Greenaway -
Are animals like car-crashes - Acts of God or mere Accidents - bizarre, tragic, farcical, plotted nowadays into a scenario by an ingenious storyteller, Mr C Darwin?
Peter Greenaway -
I think that films or indeed any art work should be made in a way that they are infinitely viewable; so that you could go back to it time and time again, not necessarily immediately but over a space of time, and see new things in it, or new ways of looking at it.
Peter Greenaway
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Smut is a target for reconstructed cricketing accidents - he is the Cricket Saint Sebastian.
Peter Greenaway -
The game Flights of Fancy or Reverse Strip Jump is played from as high a jumping-point as a competitor will dare. After each successful jump, the competitor is allowing to put on an article of clothing. Thirteen jumps is normally more than enough to see a competitor fully dressed for the day.
Peter Greenaway -
I have always had severe problems with Austrians. … Musical, churchy, uptight... nice legs... hypocritical... authoritarian... always insist their dustbins are very clean.
Peter Greenaway -
Are these clues? Which ones are important? Which ones are incidental? Which ones are circumstantial?
Peter Greenaway -
I don't want to be a film-maker. I think painting is far more exciting and profound.
Peter Greenaway -
Perhaps, sadly, in the end, cinema is only a translator's art, and you know what they say about translators: traitors all.
Peter Greenaway
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No more. A puff of writing long gone. Is this the child pulling on the flying cloth of its mother's last worn dress?
Peter Greenaway -
'Raw sex is the last thing you are going to encounter in a Jane Austen woman.'
Peter Greenaway -
I don't believe in the deplorable notion of realism in the cinema: you can over-reach it, and it becomes as false as convention.
Peter Greenaway -
The moistened thumb of the expectant reader has not yet marked the soft tissues of this lean clean smiling volume. Spread me, and break me open, for pleasure.
Peter Greenaway -
Isn't that why people keep diaries - to be read by someone else? Why would they keep them otherwise?
Peter Greenaway -
The word for smoke should look like smoke - the word for rain should look like rain...
Peter Greenaway
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Orchestra: Anagram of carthorse.
Peter Greenaway -
A thrown-stone trajectory is a good metaphor for so many phenomena: the curve of an event, any event; the curve of a life, any life; the curve of a hypothesis; the curve experienced in the manufacture of a work of art; the curve of interest experienced in the manufacture of a catalogue.
Peter Greenaway -
Get the Titanic sailing correctly before you worry about the deck chairs.
Peter Greenaway -
Whether you're Godard or Almodovar or Scorsese, it's text, text, text. Everything begins with the text, and this is a source of great anguish to me. So please let cinema get on with doing what it does best, which is expressing ideas in visual terms.
Peter Greenaway