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Go on. Treat me like the page of a book. Your book.
Peter Greenaway
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There have been innumerable films about film-making, but Otto e Mezzo was a film about the processes of thinking about making a film - certainly the most enjoyable part of any cinema creation.
Peter Greenaway
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Farewells can be both beautiful and despicable. Saying farewell to one who is loved is very complicated.
Peter Greenaway
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The pages are so harmonious in their proportion / disharmony in the contents is impossible.
Peter Greenaway
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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.
Peter Greenaway
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She picks up the baby and contemplates the Bonsai-bush, and, as we watch, in the growing half-dark, the Bonsai-bush flowers. On the black-and-white film, the thousands of flower-petals blush a deep red.
Peter Greenaway
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You can play lacrosse all over the world provided you know where the goalposts are.
Peter Greenaway
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My brother works for a forestry commission. He writes only in green ink to persuade his bossess to make it a standard ecological colour for all forestry business. I asked him what colour ink he would use if he gave up eating whale meat and worked for a whaling company. He said whales were colour blind.
Peter Greenaway
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The whole of this studio is bonded; that is to say, we are not officially in Japan per se, but rather, in what is considered for these purposes an adjunct of the customs shed at Narita airport. Officially, we are not here because we are pornographic. It's a rather curious situation.
Peter Greenaway
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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, ...
Peter Greenaway
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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.
Peter Greenaway
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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.
Peter Greenaway
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Prospero has always felt most at ease in a study, surrounded by books.
Peter Greenaway
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'How safe are we here?'
Peter Greenaway
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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.
Peter Greenaway
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This is where I begin to do the writing. I am now going to be the pen and not the paper.
Peter Greenaway
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Americans don't understand what metaphor in cinema is about. They're extremely good at making straightforward, linear narrative movies, which entertain superbly. But they very rarely do anything else.
Peter Greenaway
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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.
Peter Greenaway
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When I was young I hated my body because it was so thin - now I try not to look at it too much because it's so old. There perhaps might have been just six months when I felt comfortable with it - when I discovered alcohol for the first time and learnt to drive and was fattening out and had just met your mother.
Peter Greenaway
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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.
Peter Greenaway
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'Imagine a world without a fixed point.'
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
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If you knew when you were going to die, wouldn't you make your life more worthwhile?
Peter Greenaway
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Twenty-four pulleys, one hundred counterweights / two lenses, dark shadows...
Peter Greenaway
