Peter Greenaway Quotes

'Miss Rumphius' has been, perhaps, the closest to my heart. There are, of course, many dissimilarities between me and Alice Rumphius, but, as I worked, she gradually seemed to become my alter ego. Perhaps she had been that right from the start.

I'm a very boring person in my real life so I got to act out misbehaving fantasies was really fun.

In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

In my case, literature is a kind of revenge. It's something that gives me what real life can't give me - all the adventures, all the suffering. All the experiences I can only live in the imagination, literature completes.

One of the things that draws writers to writing is that they can get things right that they got wrong in real life by writing about them.

I can think of no greater happiness than to be clear-sighted and know the miracle when it happens. And I can think of no more real life than the adventurous one of living and liking and exclaiming the things of one's own time.

The challenge is to write about real things magically.

I've never sung a single song in my whole life on purpose to shock anyone. My 'hot numbers' are all, if you will notice, written about something that is real in the lives of millions of people.

I kind of like the idea of taking a concept and going all the way with it, even if it's not completely plausible. It's something that I like about making movies. You have a concept that maybe would not work in real life, but you can make it work in the world you're creating.

Acting gives me a chance to be people I will never be, in real life. I like changing who I am.

Art's true purpose is to be human as opposed to some rarefied activity set away from real life. I think art should help you to navigate the real challenges of being a human being.

The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.

Clean, quick, and easy as lying. We know how it ends practically before it starts. That's why stories appeal to us. They give is the clarity and simplicity our real lives lack.

It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write.

I have a split - of my real home-life side that's real-life, and then the creative side that is not necessarily real-life, but it intersects my real-life so much.

These problems are real, and you can't turn off real life. So I won't try. Instead, I'll give you a set of tools to help you deal with real life.

There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.

When somebody is doing something really funny, in real life and as a performer, my instinct is to join them.

I love to create and I love to be challenged and I love to do things that are scary, so I think I would probably think about jumping off a bridge if somebody told me that's going to make that shot real great. I'd be like, "Okay, here we go, let's do it." Like, yeah.

Just getting to talk to that person [Woody Allen ] in real life was pretty wild.

Now I'd like someone to tell me there is no drama in real life!

I'd killed him in the end, but revenge only makes things all better in the movies. In real life, once the villain is dead the trauma lives on inside the victims.

They are travelling cheaply, with that touch of indolence and occasional luxury that comes only from having real resources. They live in Levis and sunlight. Sometimes they brush their teeth in streams.

I wrote to find beauty and purpose, to know that love is possible and lasting and real.... Once I got to my desk, once I started writing, I still believed anything was possible.

Adventurous men enjoy shipwrecks, mutinies, earthquakes, conflagrations, and all kinds of unpleasant experiences. They say to themselves, for example, 'So this is what an earthquake is like,' and it gives them pleasure to have their knowledge of the world increased by this new item.