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'Imagine you are sucking the little fingers of a lady... or... no, you wouldn't understand that - since you'd never get that close to a lady - who'd want to get that close to you for God's sake?'
Peter Greenaway -
'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.'
Peter Greenaway
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My personal obsessions are much more interesting to me than other people's.
Peter Greenaway -
I don't have any particular wish to be polemical or didactic; I don't have a 'message', but what I do thoroughly enjoy are those works of art, not necessarily in the cinema, but in the other arts as well, which have an encyclopaedic world.
Peter Greenaway -
On the same day as I started to keep my own pillow-book - I met my future husband for the first time. I was six, he was ten. We did not exchange a word. He had been hand-picked by my father's publisher.
Peter Greenaway -
Try this experiment: Pick a famous movie - 'Casablanca,' say - and summarize the plot in one sentence. Is that plot you just described the thing you remember most about it? Doubtful. Narrative is a necessary cement, but it disappears from memory.
Peter Greenaway -
We have to change the educational curricula and put a lot more emphasis on how important seeing and looking is.
Peter Greenaway -
The penis - if you think about it - is the most enterprising engineering feat imaginable - a cantilevered structure, hydraulics, propulsion, pistons, compression, inflation, heat sensitive - practically every engineering characteristic - towers, draw-bridges, rocket-ships - no man-made engineering structure to match it.
Peter Greenaway
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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.
Peter Greenaway -
I believe there's no such thing as history; there's only historians, and in English, we've got this word 'his'tory, but what about her story? So that, in the end, the history of the world would be a history of every single one of its members, but of course, you could never get to grips with that.
Peter Greenaway -
A woman materialises behind Prospero - leaning lightly on the back of his chair - she is alternately a Titianesque nude and then the Vesalius figure - flayed … she leans lightly over and kisses Prospero on the cheek. The kiss leaves a blood-red mark on his withered cheek. Prospero shivers.
Peter Greenaway -
I would be curious about one of those Jane Austen women - you know - long-suffering, dutiful - but all right in the end - a plump 19th century type, five foot four, ringlets, brown eyes, long fingers.
Peter Greenaway -
If you think about it, most cinema is built along 19th-century models. You would hardly think that the cinema had discovered James Joyce sometimes.
Peter Greenaway -
Inspiration: A miasma originating in the head that pollutes the body and irritates good sense.
Peter Greenaway
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I admit that death is not just about you, it's also about the people who love you.
Peter Greenaway -
Blood: A red substance believed to be capable of supporting life but which in a theatrical drama invariably indicates death.
Peter Greenaway -
If you want to tell stories, be a writer, not a filmmaker.
Peter Greenaway -
If you were not to be its victim, this book and body would amuse you with its arrogance. It would make you laugh. Because you were not its victim, you could feel no pain of betrayal.
Peter Greenaway -
We wait - it seems for minutes - looking at the night sky. Then, suddenly breaking the silence and making us start with alarm and fear... there is a savage, heart-rending, gurgling scream.
Peter Greenaway -
Jean Renoir once suggested that most true creators have only one idea and spend their lives reworking it, but then very rapidly he added that most people don't have any ideas at all, so one idea is pretty amazing.
Peter Greenaway
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I married. I became a wife. I acquired a husband. I had a ceremonial wedding in style. Whichever way you say it - it was bound to end badly.
Peter Greenaway -
Where is a book before it is born? Does a book grow like a tree? Who are a book's parents? Does a book need two parents - a mother and a father? Can a book be born inside another book? And where is the parent book of books?
Peter Greenaway -
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.
Peter Greenaway -
It could be said now that all animals live in zoos, whether it is a zoo in Regent's Park, London or a Nigerian Game Reserve. Perhaps what's left to argue is only the zoo's quality.
Peter Greenaway