Peter Greenaway Quotes
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Orchestra: Anagram of carthorse.
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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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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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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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I obviously irritate people. I obviously antagonise them.
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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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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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The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.
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The word for smoke should look like smoke - the word for rain should look like rain...
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Religion is there to say, 'Hey, you don't have to worry - there's an afterlife.'
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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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A hand cannot write on itself.
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You don't go into the National Gallery of any famous capital city and cry, sob, laugh, fall about on the floor, become very angry - it's a completely different reaction. It's a reaction which is to do with a much more composed sense of regarding an image; it's a reaction with a thought process as opposed to an immediate emotional reaction.
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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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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.
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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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My personal obsessions are much more interesting to me than other people's.
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'Naked! So I can see no pranks and ruses.'
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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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Alas, despite wing implants, feathers and wax, and carnal associations with swans, we will never grow wings. Alas, any true flight we make will always be externally assisted. Alas, the best we can do is fall and believe ourselves flying.
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All my films are somewhat experimental, they are all, each one, taking a certain amount of risk, but there's always the basic assumption that we should be able to appreciate the cinema as much with the mind as we can through emotional empathy. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.