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... there are tens of thousands of photographs taken here, all taken very patiently, because decay can be very slow.. Ten months for a human body... they say...
Peter Greenaway -
I want to be a prime creator - as every self-regarding artist should do.
Peter Greenaway
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Jerome was dyslexic until he was twelve, before it became fashionable. And he broke every pair of glasses I bought him. He hated wearing glasses. He was good at breaking things. Especially relationships. Just like his father.
Peter Greenaway -
Dawns and sunsets. The Magic Hour - when the sun and the moon can be in the sky at the same time - a magic and disturbing occurrence for a child. And for an adult.
Peter Greenaway -
Cinema ceases to be passive and becomes active: you, the audience, are now, in some senses, in charge of the filmmaking process. You have all got mobile phones, you have all got cam recorders, and you've all got laptops, so you're all filmmakers.
Peter Greenaway -
Human relationships are patterned and cross-patterned and restricted and limited and de-limited and caged and freed again by the elaborate conventions, rules, and games we call Civilisation … the rules and the games are often absurd and farcical - sometimes they are tragic - yet we tacitly acknowledge that they are necessary.
Peter Greenaway -
Later this device of mirror and mirror-carriers will be developed and many changes rung from its possibilities.
Peter Greenaway -
The major sweep of this book's living is too often marred by qualifying. It is hedged about with ifs and buts and if onlys and howevers, excuses for a life that is about to shut its covers for the last time and then crumple into dust in an unseen and never-to-be-remembered library.
Peter Greenaway
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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.
Peter Greenaway -
I suppose I am gently cynical about notions of who we think we are, but I certainly don't hate my fellow man. I think my cinema, although it might often deal with death and decay, is highly celebratory.
Peter Greenaway -
The start of a film is like a gateway, a formal entrance-point. The first three minutes of a film make great demands on an audience's patience and credulity. A great deal has to be learnt very rapidly about place and attitude, character and intent and ambition.
Peter Greenaway -
Secret: A private matter whispered abroad and never kept to oneself. By naming it a secret, we immediately indicate its presence. If we really wanted to keep secrets, we would not have a name for them.
Peter Greenaway -
Thanks to secondary education and the Internet, we're all knowledgeable now - if knowledge means the accumulation of facts. Curators are those who know how to maneuver around that knowledge.
Peter Greenaway -
Whispering can be a rest from a noisy world of words.
Peter Greenaway
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Esmerelda, the grieving widow, continues to burn and scream. In our minds we rush to save her from the consuming flames. But cannot.
Peter Greenaway -
'We must ask Kito to come over.'
Peter Greenaway -
It is a most unexpected Earthquake in Geneva.
Peter Greenaway -
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.
Peter Greenaway -
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.
Peter Greenaway -
A man bringing himself, melody and mathematics into perfect and enviable proportions. / only more so, much more so.
Peter Greenaway
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I suppose I have a concern for this extraordinary, beautiful, amazing, exciting, taxonomically brilliant world that we live in, but we keep fucking it up all the time.
Peter Greenaway -
'What good are all these books to you? You can't eat them! How can they make you happy?'
Peter Greenaway -
It is an awesome sight, repeatedly drawn and painted. How long did it last, this Fall of Angels? Was it all over in an hour? Or did it take days, weeks, years? Is it still going on?
Peter Greenaway -
'I once saw a film where the main character didn't speak for the first half hour.'
Peter Greenaway