Peter Greenaway Quotes

I've always been fascinated by maps and cartography. A map tells you where you've been, where you are, and where you're going -- in a sense it's three tenses in one.

I have always had severe problems with Austrians. ... Musical, churchy, uptight... nice legs... hypocritical... authoritarian... always insist their dustbins are very clean.

I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself.

I really, sincerely believe that one should trust the work, and not the author.

You can play lacrosse all over the world provided you know where the goalposts are.

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.

Works of art are never finished, just stopped.

Every historian has a vested interest. "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" was not about the Roman but the British empire. What price the truth?

I always think that art is one of the most wonderful exciting curious ways to learn. I have no worries or apologies about art being used as a teaching medium.

Most cinema is not about images but text. Why on earth have we based cinema on text? Why can't we break that umbilical cord? Why do we have to pollute cinema?

I am certain that there are two things in life which are dependable: the delights of the flesh and the delights of literature. I have had the good fortune to enjoy them both equally.

Only cinema narrows its concern down to its content, that is to its story. It should, instead, concern itself with its form, its structure.

As for critics, one mediocre writer is more valuable than ten good critics. They are like haughty, barren spinsters lodged in a maternity ward.

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.

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

If you never lived out your sexuality - it's a great force, and if you try to fight it, what does that create? Energy: positive and negative, self-loathing.

Whispering can be a rest from a noisy world of words.

There is visual illiteracy with text-oriented films like bloody 'Harry Potter' and 'Lord of the Rings.'.

I want to regard my public as infinitely intelligent, as understanding notions of the suspension of disbelief and as realising all the time that this is not a slice of life, this is openly a film.

Cinema is far too rich and capable a medium to be merely left to the storytellers.

We don't need virtual reality, we need virtual unreality.

The best painting is totally non-narrative. It doesn't have to tell you a story.

The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.

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.

I obviously irritate people. I obviously antagonise them.

It's so miserable and so easy to keep slamming Titanic -- I'll shut up.

English culture is highly literary-based.

Words reproduce themselves pleasurably too.

I've always been fascinated by Eisenstein.

Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward.

What are you - some kind of addict? Is this where you come to.

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.

I have transmitted genetic material, all I have to do between my daughters' birth and my death is to decorate my life.

I was continually connected with the whole world and never got any rest. At the moment, I spend only a few hours weekly on the net, that's just better for me.

My favourite way of watching the cinema is the biggest possible cinema you can find, with the biggest possible screen, and the loudest possible Dolby - but just me. Nobody else.

Cinema is dead, long live cinema.

Bill Viola is worth ten Scorseses.

Cinema has reached a dead end.

Cinema is not a playground for Sharon Stone.

That comes from most people having an American film model in their heads which is nothing but a total illusionary masturbatory massage.

I think my films are very English. That certain emotional distance, interest in the world, interest in irony. These are all deeply English propositions.

I share this interest in the weird, strange, unusual, surreal.

Blind eyes cannot read.

There are, after all, approaches to be made other than the dependable routes that massage sentimental expectations and provide easy opportunities for emotional identification.

We all live to a formula. Maybe the secret lies in keeping that formula secret.

The range of human skin colours is quite narrow when you think about it - and I do - and subtle - beige, pink, white, tan, taup.

A hand cannot write on itself.

If Good approved of his creature's creation, He breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His name.

It serves the purpose of not serving a purpose, surely quite a valid one.

There have been innumerable films about film-making, but Otto e Mezzo was a film about the processes of thinking about making a film -- certainly the most enjoyable part of any cinema creation.