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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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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
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More quotes by 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.
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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 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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Anybody who writes a diary insists it must be read by someone else.
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English culture is highly literary-based.
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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.
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In a world where we can all be our own filmmakers, the old elites are disappearing and there is no desire to look at somebody else's dream anymore because you can go off and make your own.
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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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I think it is really important to be in some way provocative -- either intellectually or viscerally -- in the films one makes.
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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 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.
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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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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.
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Continuity is boring.
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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 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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If every man is supposed to think of sex once every nine minutes, what on earth does he think of in the other eight?
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Cinema has reached a dead end.
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I have transmitted genetic material, all I have to do between my daughters' birth and my death is to decorate my life.
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The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.
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