Peter Greenaway Quotes
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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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'A long white dress that starts under the breast and travels on interminably down - so their legs are entirely mysterious - they could have one leg or two inside that dress... A Jane Austen woman could be incredibly passionate inside that dress.'
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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.
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'I once saw a film where the main character didn't speak for the first half hour.'
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Orchestra: Anagram of carthorse.
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It's a movie that bewilders some viewers and mesmerizes others. A man I met while we were exercising our dogs told me it was the greatest film he had ever seen, and one of my editors claims it's the closest any movie has ever come to photographing the inside of his mind.
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Get the Titanic sailing correctly before you worry about the deck chairs.
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Religion is there to say, 'Hey, you don't have to worry - there's an afterlife.'
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His writing - in so many languages - made me a sign-post pointing east, west, north and south. I had shoes in German, stockings in French, gloves in Hebrew, a hat with a veil in Italian. He only kept me naked where I was most accustomed to wearing clothes.
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All this narcissism is rather boring, isn't it?
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The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.
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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.
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The word for smoke should look like smoke - the word for rain should look like rain...
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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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Investigation is never complete.
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If every man is supposed to think of sex once every nine minutes, what on earth does he think of in the other eight?
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I'm sorry - you know, culture is elitist. Culture has to be elitist: it's about seeing and knowing and about knowledge.
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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.
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A hand cannot write on itself.
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My personal obsessions are much more interesting to me than other people's.
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Blood: A red substance believed to be capable of supporting life but which in a theatrical drama invariably indicates death.
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Whispering can be a rest from a noisy world of words.
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It's strange. In the last five minutes you have used my Christian name over and over again and never before. People I like learn my name too late.
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Galba... a miserable sort of man... bisexual... fancied mature slaves, especially if they had been a little mutilated... all his freed men had no fingers on the left hands... he's dead - died screaming... in a cellar.