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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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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
Least
Fire
Stable
Imagine
Fourth
Water
Depend
Moving
West
Three
Air
Nothing
Elements
World
Depends

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?
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A hand cannot write on itself.
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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.
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English culture is highly literary-based.
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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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Continuity is boring.
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Whispering can be a rest from a noisy world of words.
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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.
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Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.
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It serves the purpose of not serving a purpose, surely quite a valid one.
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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.
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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.
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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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We don't need virtual reality, we need virtual unreality.
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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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If Good approved of his creature's creation, He breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His name.
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Investigation is never complete.
Peter Greenaway
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The start of a film is like a gateway, a formal entrance-point. The first three minutes of a film make great demands on an audience's patience and credulity. A great deal has to be learnt very rapidly about place and attitude, character and intent and ambition.
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The best painting is totally non-narrative. It doesn't have to tell you a story.
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I went to art school, and every Tuesday and Friday we drew the nude. If you look at Western painting, male and female nudes are in the center of every painting. It's difficult and exciting to draw the nude. Why get so upset about this? It's our duty to break taboos.
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