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There are basically only two subject matters in all Western culture: sex and death. We do have some ability to manipulate sex nowadays. We have no ability, and never will have, to manipulate death.

Peter Greenaway

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Peter Greenaway
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: April 5
Actor
Cinematographer
Experimental Artist
Film Director
Film Editor
Painter
Screenwriter
Television Director
Theatrical Director
Writer
Newport
South Wales
Death
Basically
Two
Matters
Matter
Western
Never
Subject
Sex
Subjects
Ability
Manipulate
Culture
Nowadays

More quotes by Peter Greenaway

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I don't believe that one has to tear down the cinema screen in order to renew cinema. But new input and new energy are lacking. They are flowing above all into the television technologies. We must, therefore, concentrate on the CD-ROM.
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I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing.
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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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The best painting is totally non-narrative. It doesn't have to tell you a story.
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American actors are coy. We all have pricks and cunts, or are you different from the rest of us?
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If you're a Shakespeare fan, isn't that a way to negotiate sex and death?
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My heroes among filmmakers would be people like Buñuel and Pasolini, who were of very high cinematic intelligence, but tread on a lot of toes.
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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 enjoy them both equally.
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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.
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For so many filmmakers, cinema is a means to an end.
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I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself.
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In practically every film you experience, you can see the director following the text. Illustrating the words first, making the pictures after, and, alas, so often not making pictures at all, but holding up the camera to do its mimetic worst.
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Only cinema narrows its concern down to its content, that is to its story. It should, instead, concern itself with its form, its structure.
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It serves the purpose of not serving a purpose, surely quite a valid one.
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One of my heroes, almost necessarily from what I'm saying, of course, is Borges, who is a supreme master of doing thing -- being a data bank -- and the beauty of this economy is that he could have written War and Peace in three or four pages who knows, it might have been a better book.
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I like a lot of glasses about - it highers the tone.
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Investigation is never complete.
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I do indeed think that cinema is mortal. There is a lot of evidence already that it is dying on its feet.
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Cinema is dead, long live cinema.
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The pretence that numbers are not the humble creation of man, but are the exacting language of the Universe and therefore possess the secret of all things, is comforting, terrifying and mesmeric.
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