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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.

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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Investigation is never complete.
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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A hand cannot write on itself.
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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My personal obsessions are much more interesting to me than other people's.
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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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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The game Flights of Fancy or Reverse Strip Jump is played from as high a jumping-point as a competitor will dare. After each successful jump, the competitor is allowing to put on an article of clothing. Thirteen jumps is normally more than enough to see a competitor fully dressed for the day.
Peter Greenaway
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I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself.
Peter Greenaway
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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?
Peter Greenaway
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For so many filmmakers, cinema is a means to an end.
Peter Greenaway
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I don't believe that one has to tear down the cinema screen in order to renew cinema. But new input and new energy are lacking. They are flowing above all into the television technologies. We must, therefore, concentrate on the CD-ROM.
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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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 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.
Peter Greenaway
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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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We live in a time of excess - excess population, excess information.
Peter Greenaway
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We don't need virtual reality, we need virtual unreality.
Peter Greenaway
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The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.
Peter Greenaway
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The best painting is totally non-narrative. It doesn't have to tell you a story.
Peter Greenaway