Derek Jarman Quotes

#1. These names: gay, queer, homosexual are limiting. I would love to finish with them. We're going to have to decide which terms to use and where we use them. For me to use the word 'queer' is a liberation; it was a word that frightened me, but no longer.

Derek Jarman

#2. Oh how Shakespeare would have loved cinema!

Derek Jarman

#3. Indian yellow, banned. Cows were poisoned with mango leaves and the colour was made from their urine. It is the bright yellow in Indian miniatures. Although yellow occupies one-twentieth of the spectrum, it is the brightest colour.

Derek Jarman

#4. a dream world, a world of magic and ritual, yet there are images there of the burning cars and radar systems, which remind you there is a price to be paid in order to gain this dream in the face of a world of violence.

Derek Jarman

#5. All men are homosexual, some turn straight. It must be very odd to be a straight man because your sexuality is hopelessly defensive. It's like an ideal of racial purity.

Derek Jarman

#6. I wouldn't wish the eighties on anyone, it was the time when all that was rotten bubbled to the surface. If you were not at the receiving end of this mayhem you could be unaware of it.

Derek Jarman

#7. The preserve of ambition and folly in pursuit of illusion, or delusion.

Derek Jarman

#8. The Last Of England works with image and sound, a language which is nearer to poetry than prose. It tells its story quite happily in silent images, in contrast to a word-bound cinema ...

Derek Jarman

#9. I want the world to be filled with white fluffy duckies

Derek Jarman

#10. The Gautama Buddha instructs me to walk away from illness. But he wasn't attached to a drip.

Derek Jarman

#11. Pain can be alleviated by morphine but the pain of social ostracism cannot be taken away.

Derek Jarman

#12. Red protects itself. No colour is as territorial. It stakes a claim, is on the alert against the spectrum.

Derek Jarman

#13. If you can, trap me. I'll make a good patient because I was brought up in the environment of authority; it's going to be hard to pull me in though- I've been running all my life, playing truant. If you can capture me I'll buckle down. I'll loathe you in secret and put on a good face.

Derek Jarman

#14. Violet has the shortest wavelength of the spectrum. Behind it, the invisible ultraviolet. Roses are Red, Violets are Blue. Poor violet, violated for a rhyme.

Derek Jarman

#15. I'm not afraid of death but I am afraid of dying.

Derek Jarman

#16. On December 22, 1986, finding I was body positive, I set myself a target: I would disclose my secret and survive Margaret Thatcher. I did. Now I have set my sights on the millennium and a world where we are all equal.

Derek Jarman

#17. The queers of the sixties, like those since, have connived with their repression under a veneer of respectability. Good mannered city queens in suits and pinstripes, so busy establishing themselves, were useless at changing anything.

Derek Jarman

#18. If Gucci handbags were still in fashion Greenaway would carry his scripts in them.

Derek Jarman

#19. People say to me, "You make fantastic films" and I say, "No, I make documentaries.

Derek Jarman

#20. Painters used red like spice

Derek Jarman

#21. Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea. Understand that your morality is not law. Understand that we are you. Understand that if we decide to have sex whether safe, safer, or unsafe, it is our decision and you have no rights in our lovemaking.

Derek Jarman