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A French critic referred to me as a gay pessimist, with gay used in its older sense, and talked of Cocteau in the same breath.

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
Gay
Critics
Referred
Older
Pessimist
Sense
Critic
Used
Talked
French
Breath
Breaths

More quotes by Peter Greenaway

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English culture is highly literary-based.
Peter Greenaway
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I don't have any particular wish to be polemical or didactic I don't have a 'message', but what I do thoroughly enjoy are those works of art, not necessarily in the cinema, but in the other arts as well, which have an encyclopaedic world.
Peter Greenaway
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I am Welsh by birth, English by education, and European by nature.
Peter Greenaway
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The best painting is totally non-narrative. It doesn't have to tell you a story.
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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My personal obsessions are much more interesting to me than other people's.
Peter Greenaway
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Human relationships are patterned and cross-patterned and restricted and limited and delimited and caged and freed again by the elaborate conventions, rules and games which we call civilisation. They're often absurd and farcical, and sometimes they're tragic, yet we acknowledge that they are necessary.
Peter Greenaway
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We live in a time of excess - excess population, excess information.
Peter Greenaway
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I admit that death is not just about you, it's also about the people who love you.
Peter Greenaway
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We are all united by the phenomenon that we have a body and that body is universally the same, more or less. If we lose sight of that perspective, everything can desperately suffer.
Peter Greenaway
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There's more religion in my little finger than there is in the pope. But no, I don't believe in God. I am an athiest. A Darwinian evolutionist.
Peter Greenaway
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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.
Peter Greenaway
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Investigation is never complete.
Peter Greenaway
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I don't believe in the deplorable notion of realism in the cinema: you can over-reach it, and it becomes as false as convention.
Peter Greenaway
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I also think that everyone has an elitist approach to his own art, a complex knowledge of it, whether he is a clockmaker or an engineer. And I think it's perfectly legitimate to make use of this knowledge because it enriches the overall texture of life.
Peter Greenaway
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We don't need virtual reality, we need virtual unreality.
Peter Greenaway
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Jean Renoir once suggested that most true creators have only one idea and spend their lives reworking it, but then very rapidly he added that most people don't have any ideas at all, so one idea is pretty amazing.
Peter Greenaway
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Itch to read, scratch to understand.
Peter Greenaway
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I think that films or indeed any art work should be made in a way that they are infinitely viewable so that you could go back to it time and time again, not necessarily immediately but over a space of time, and see new things in it, or new ways of looking at it.
Peter Greenaway
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Eisenstein was a good editor. I was trained as a film editor, and I've no doubt that the editor is key to a film.
Peter Greenaway