Peter Greenaway Quotes
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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.
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Two children die. An accident and a suicide amongst so many murders. A chance death and a death of self-recrimination. Smut and the Skipping Girl have been aping their parents and elders - perhaps they could now teach them a lesson - all the machinations and game-playing and adjusting for sexual and emotional positioning is not worth the effort.
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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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'How safe are we here?'
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All this takes many clumsy and inexact word-descriptions to describe, but if we read paintings like we read books, it would not be such a hidden language for painting can effortlessly produce such elegant solutions.
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Why illustrate a great piece of writing whose very advocacy and evocation and efficacy lies within its very existence as writing?
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For 8,000 years, we've had lyric poetry; for 400 years we've had the novel: theatre hands its meaning down in text. Let's find a medium whose total, sole responsibility is the world as seen as a form of visual intelligence. Surely, surely, surely the cinema should be that phenomenon.
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Life is full of a thousand red herrings, and it takes the history of a civilisation to work out which are the red herrings and which aren't.
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The range of human skin colours is quite narrow when you think about it - and I do - and subtle - beige, pink, white, tan, taupe, ...
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Men are so shit scared of female activities, especially if they are clandestine.
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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.
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You should be allowed to rub out and start again, it means that you are human. The purists are tedious, they tell you a mistake is like an enduring black mark. Nonsense - better to be human than some infernal machine never going wrong.
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'Imagine a world without a fixed point.'
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Painting: Once upon a time a painting was a two-dimensional representation; now it is anything its author thinks is appropriate.
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Anybody who writes a diary insists it must be read by someone else.
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If you knew when you were going to die, wouldn't you make your life more worthwhile?
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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.
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Dots ...: Small marks variously made to indicate infinity, hesitation, duplication, or lack of imagination.
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The pages are so harmonious in their proportion / disharmony in the contents is impossible.
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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?
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Farewells can be both beautiful and despicable. Saying farewell to one who is loved is very complicated.
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It's sort of cathartic - the naked exposure - don't you think? You couldn't do it voluntarily - could you? It's under duress - so somehow legitimate. Circumstances beyond our control. I think I enjoyed that.
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You know to make his rigid, tedious, boring paintings seem at least a little human, the Mondrian enthusiasts keep insisting that Mondrian was a great tango dancer.
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My biggest critical success was 'The Draughtsman's Contract,' but then it wasn't the English who particularly thought so; it was the French, who are much more interested in Cartesian logic: in finding your way through more cerebral puzzle-making, if you wish.