Peter Greenaway Quotes
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I want to be a prime creator - as every self-regarding artist should do.
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A series of ever-decreasing splashes drip and plop into black water... thus the beginning of the film is reprised.
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Cinema: An illusion that can only satisfactorily happen in the dark.
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'What are you - some kind of addict? Is this where you come to...'
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Cinema is far too rich and capable a medium to be merely left to the storytellers.
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It is Vesalius' Anatomy of Birth - a book of drawings and diagrams of human anatomy. Beautiful drawings but - as the pages turn - terrible in their frankness...
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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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Nagiko, I am waiting for you. Meet me at the library. Any library. Every library. Yours, Jerome.
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At once, far off... begins a rumbling, droning noise - like a thousand distant flying machines - like the sound of an armada of mechanical birds - a noise reminiscent of implacable, massive stage machinery in a masque or pageant that is several streets away. It is not one sound but many sounds combined. This is the sound of Prospero's magic.
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I cannot keep a clock or a watch. They stop on me. Why won't time stay peacefully on my wrist? Is time not interested in me any more because I am dying?
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1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 37 ...
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I am certain that there are two things in life which are dependable - the delights of the flesh and the delights of literature. I have had the good fortune to bring them together and enjoy them together in full quantity.
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Too late. Too late to retreat. Your heart is open. The book has got you. Your body is wide open. This rat of a book has invaded your privacy, worried its feeling into your entrails by every private passage.
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And I've also written a play called Miranda, about what happens afterwards on the ship on the way home. It's about what happens to innocence and how it has to be destroyed.
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The floorboards point in parallel lines to a vanishing point that does not concern us - somewhere beyond the opera house, across the streets, across the houses of the suburbs, all the way to a hypothetical single dot... on the sea's horizon. Far from this sour drama.
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Leaving slowly, / sucking in cold air round a warm tongue, / ennui synchronized to the pulse, / reports from a coiled trachea, / It is only irregular clocks...
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Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward.
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Grief: An emotional experience often brought about by a great sense of loss. The subject of this loss is completely immaterial.
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To be an atheist you have to have ten thousand times more imagination than if you are a religious fundamentalist. You must take the responsibility to acquire information, digest and use it to understand what you can.
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We have more than enough deodorised, over-the-top, sentimental cinema. Let's try to bring a little human intelligence into things. It can be very rewarding.
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... I would certainly like to work with Dennehy again. When he was presented with the script he didn't know me from Adam, and why should he, small-time eccentric, esoteric Englishman that I am?
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I'm an excuse for medical experiments and art theory. You must get me out of here and out of the hospital.
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You can't write. That's not writing. It's scribbling. Distasteful scribbling. Why can't you write properly?
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It's a big criticism of Greenaway films that they are far too interested in formalism and not enough interested in notions of emotional content. It's a criticism I can fully understand from a public that has been brought up by Hollywood movies that demand intense emotional rapport.