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Farewells can be both beautiful and despicable. Saying farewell to one who is loved is very complicated.
Peter Greenaway -
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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Men are so shit scared of female activities, especially if they are clandestine.
Peter Greenaway -
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 -
For so many filmmakers, cinema is a means to an end.
Peter Greenaway -
We all live to a formula. Maybe the secret lies in keeping that formula secret.
Peter Greenaway -
Anybody who writes a diary insists it must be read by someone else.
Peter Greenaway -
'Money's not interesting - too easy to get hold of.'
Peter Greenaway
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'What do you mean - Happy anniversary? It's not my birthday.'
Peter Greenaway -
The large body of the swan wedged in the shattered glass of the car windscreen fills the film frame. Its head is bent back on itself in a parody of its orthodox gracefulness.
Peter Greenaway -
This drawing is three quarters ball, one quarter philosopher, which might be about the right space to keep a philosopher in his place.
Peter Greenaway -
One film is based on the Medea myth about a woman who kills her own child - The Love of Ruins. It is almost a technical exercise to see if I can convince an audience or make an audience sympathetic to a woman who kills her own child.
Peter Greenaway -
Go on. Treat me like the page of a book. Your book.
Peter Greenaway -
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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Imagine a world where nothing is stable. In the West, we have three moving elements - Air, Fire, Water - but at least we can depend on the fourth.
Peter Greenaway -
As for the girl - the child of a prostitute - what of her future? A life of prostitution in a gaudy dress - pretending to be Nell Gwynne, the Protestant whore? No - out of her mother's earnings she will go to University and study to become an astronomer. Charles II made his mistress Nell Gwynne an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1674.
Peter Greenaway -
This book and I have become indivisible. I have placed my feet on this book's last pages, confident of standing so much higher in the world than I ever stood before.
Peter Greenaway -
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 -
Dots ...: Small marks variously made to indicate infinity, hesitation, duplication, or lack of imagination.
Peter Greenaway -
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.
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 -
I like a lot of glasses about - it highers the tone.
Peter Greenaway -
'What are you - some kind of addict? Is this where you come to...'
Peter Greenaway -
In the game of Dawn Card-Castles, fifty-two playing cards are stacked up into a castle in a draught-free space: the player can determine the dreams of the next night if he awakes before the castle collapses. Those players who wish to dream of Romance build their castle with the seven of hearts.
Peter Greenaway