Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Things
Possess
Men
Humble
Therefore
Creation
Numbers
Exacting
Secret
Pretence
Universe
Terrifying
Language
Comforting

More quotes by Peter Greenaway

Image
All the material is fictional and develops its own eight and a half private, coelesced journeys, where, perhaps not unexpectedly, the females can run faster than the men and trade their freedoms by exhausting the male sexual fantasies and replacing them by some of their own.
Peter Greenaway
Image
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.
Peter Greenaway
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Peter Greenaway
Image
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
Image
Anybody who writes a diary insists it must be read by someone else.
Peter Greenaway
Image
Whispering can be a rest from a noisy world of words.
Peter Greenaway
Image
I like a lot of glasses about - it highers the tone.
Peter Greenaway
Image
I admit that death is not just about you, it's also about the people who love you.
Peter Greenaway
Image
We all know that we're going to die, but we don't know when. That's not a blessing, that's a curse.
Peter Greenaway
Image
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
Image
The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.
Peter Greenaway
Image
Works of art are never finished, just stopped.
Peter Greenaway
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Cinema has reached a dead end.
Peter Greenaway
Image
Cinema is dead, long live cinema.
Peter Greenaway
Image
We don't need virtual reality, we need virtual unreality.
Peter Greenaway