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The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.

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
Education
Books
Book
Sistine
Work
Chapel
Lays
Bible
Extraordinary
Early

More quotes by Peter Greenaway

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I think my films are always quite self-reflexive and always question 'why am I doing this, is this the right way to do it, what is cinema for, does it have a purpose?
Peter Greenaway
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Cinema has reached a dead end.
Peter Greenaway
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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.
Peter Greenaway
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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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Continuity is boring.
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
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If you're a Shakespeare fan, isn't that a way to negotiate sex and death?
Peter Greenaway
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I still would like you to feel the enthusiasm that all those people felt in the twenties and thirties, that indeed we had discovered, with cinema, the great 20th-century, all-embracing medium.
Peter Greenaway
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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.
Peter Greenaway
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I have always had severe problems with Austrians. ... Musical, churchy, uptight... nice legs... hypocritical... authoritarian... always insist their dustbins are very clean.
Peter Greenaway
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I got in trouble with the stern-faced Russians who didn't want me to create a guy who is mortal.
Peter Greenaway
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A hand cannot write on itself.
Peter Greenaway
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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.
Peter Greenaway
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If Good approved of his creature's creation, He breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His name.
Peter Greenaway
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Anybody who writes a diary insists it must be read by someone else.
Peter Greenaway
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I never go to the cinema. I can't stand sitting in the dark with strangers -- all of us obliged to share the same emotional experiences -- it's too intimate. I like to be emotional in private.
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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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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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.
Peter Greenaway
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I think it is really important to be in some way provocative -- either intellectually or viscerally -- in the films one makes.
Peter Greenaway