Peter Greenaway Quotes
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The moods of the dark night skies are variously represented like soft black velvet, like the shining black of a scarab beetle, like the patina-ed surface of Indian-inked paper, soft blotting-paper soaked in dark blue ink for forty days, like a black cat's fur shining in moonlight...
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'Georgie doesn't like babies do you Georgie? Some days, Georgie, I think you behave like a bloke.'
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Taupe? What sort of colour is 'taupe'? It sounds like a Malaysian ground sloth encountered once every fifty years by one of the Attenboroughs wearing long socks.
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I have always had severe problems with Austrians. … Musical, churchy, uptight... nice legs... hypocritical... authoritarian... always insist their dustbins are very clean.
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This is a book and a body that is so warm to the touch. My touch.
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Cinema, which demands suspension of disbelief, is an increasingly naive proposition.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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On the other hand, I view the whole matter from a cosmic perspective. I don't take a position. I believe that there are no more positions to take, no certainties, no facts. Many people find this confusing about my films; they say I am hiding out behind irony. But from a cosmic viewpoint, it is eternally unimportant whether one lives or not.
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Perhaps, sadly, in the end, cinema is only a translator's art, and you know what they say about translators: traitors all.
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I obviously irritate people. I obviously antagonise them.
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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.
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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.
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This book is gaudy like a gilded cauliflower which smells so bad after a good hot water soaking, like hot chocolate sweetened with sugar beet / incompatibles blended incongruously to no purpose.
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I think my films are always quite self-reflexive and always question 'why am I doing this, is this the right way to do it, what is cinema for, does it have a purpose?'
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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?
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I don't want to be a film-maker. I think painting is far more exciting and profound.
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Are these clues? Which ones are important? Which ones are incidental? Which ones are circumstantial?
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Smut is a target for reconstructed cricketing accidents - he is the Cricket Saint Sebastian.
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As for the girl - the child of a prostitute - what of her future? A life of prostitution in a gaudy dress - pretending to be Nell Gwynne, the Protestant whore? No - out of her mother's earnings she will go to University and study to become an astronomer. Charles II made his mistress Nell Gwynne an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1674.
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Roy, this is my wife, Georgina Spica - she has a heart of gold and a body to match... and I am Albert Spica and I have a heart of gold and a great deal of money to match.
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My personal obsessions are much more interesting to me than other people's.