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

More quotes by 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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I admit that death is not just about you, it's also about the people who love you.
Peter Greenaway
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Continuity is boring.
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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I think it is really important to be in some way provocative -- either intellectually or viscerally -- in the films one makes.
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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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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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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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.
Peter Greenaway
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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.
Peter Greenaway
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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.
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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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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Works of art are never finished, just stopped.
Peter Greenaway
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It seems so tragic to me that so many filmmakers are making movies up against this extra-ordinary revolution with one eye closed and two hands tied behind their backs.
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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I do indeed think that cinema is mortal. There is a lot of evidence already that it is dying on its feet.
Peter Greenaway
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What are you - some kind of addict? Is this where you come to.
Peter Greenaway
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Words reproduce themselves pleasurably too.
Peter Greenaway
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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.
Peter Greenaway