Peter Greenaway Quotes
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Get the Titanic sailing correctly before you worry about the deck chairs.
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Orchestra: Anagram of carthorse.
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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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'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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The word for smoke should look like smoke - the word for rain should look like rain...
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All this narcissism is rather boring, isn't it?
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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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I obviously irritate people. I obviously antagonise them.
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Religion is there to say, 'Hey, you don't have to worry - there's an afterlife.'
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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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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'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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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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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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'Naked! So I can see no pranks and ruses.'
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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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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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I think that every artist dreams of renewing the forms which came before, but I think very few can be considered to have achieved that. We are all dwarves standing upon the shoulders of the giants who preceded us, and I think we must never forget that. After all, even iconoclasts only exist with respect to that which they destroy.
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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 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.
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'You have no right to be jealous of a woman who wants to be more of a woman by watching a man dressed up as a woman.'
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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.