Top 100 Greenaway's Quotes
#1. I've always loved the language of flowers. I discovered Kate Greenaway's 'Language of Flowers' in a used bookstore when I was 16 and couldn't believe it was such a well-kept secret. How could something so beautiful and romantic be virtually unknown?
Vanessa Diffenbaugh
#2. Moments cast rivulets,
Others eyes see.
Faith awaits,
From a once dormant state,
Inside you, inside me.
Kari L. Greenaway
#3. 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
#4. If Gucci handbags were still in fashion Greenaway would carry his scripts in them.
Derek Jarman
#5. What do you want art to give you? What do you want cultural experience to give you? Shouldn't it be in-depth, profound experiences which have some satisfaction and can be retained in your four senses and your imagination for the rest of your life?
Peter Greenaway
#6. Eisenstein was a good editor. I was trained as a film editor, and I've no doubt that the editor is key to a film.
Peter Greenaway
#7. The range of human skin colours is quite narrow when you think about it
and I do
and subtle
beige, pink, white, tan, taup ...
Peter Greenaway
#8. I can't think of anyone who has done anything remotely useful after the age of 80.
Peter Greenaway
#9. 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
#11. Why must we hide,
Behind walls built high?
N' blame our lives,
On him, her, I?
Kari L. Greenaway
#12. 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 bring them together and enjoy them together in full quantity.
Peter Greenaway
#13. 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
#14. I never go to the cinema. I can't stand sitting in the dark with strangers
all of us obliged to share the same emotional experiences
it's too intimate. I like to be emotional in private.
Peter Greenaway
#15. His changes are true,
And oh for a reason.
His work is eternal,
And arrives in due season.
Kari L. Greenaway
#16. Anybody who writes a diary insists it must be read by someone else.
Peter Greenaway
#17. I do indeed think that cinema is mortal. There is a lot of evidence already that it is dying on its feet.
Peter Greenaway
#18. We are all united by the phenomenon that we have a body and that body is universally the same, more or less. If we lose sight of that perspective, everything can desperately suffer.
Peter Greenaway
#19. For many things were shown,
Recorded and written down.
But what is God to do,
When His Word you do renounce?
Kari L. Greenaway
#22. Excerpt From the Poem-" Prayer"
Such a pleasant,
And heartfelt task.
To him implore,
And mercies ask.
Kari L. Greenaway
#24. I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself.
Peter Greenaway
#25. I think my films are very English. That certain emotional distance, interest in the world, interest in irony. These are all deeply English propositions.
Peter Greenaway
#27. I would be curious about one of those Jane Austen women
you know
long-suffering, dutiful
but all right in the end
a plump 19th century type, five foot four, ringlets, brown eyes, long fingers.
Peter Greenaway
#28. 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.
Peter Greenaway
#29. For joy alone,
Carries a fountain of youth.
Laughter's music,
Will wrinkle smooth.
- Poem Fountain of Youth
Kari L. Greenaway
#30. I admit that death is not just about you, it's also about the people who love you.
Peter Greenaway
#31. There are many photos of Eisenstein. I think he was quite vain, and he liked photos of him. Being a virgin at 33 is strange now, but let's not be too high-minded about that.
Peter Greenaway
#32. 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
#33. 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.
Peter Greenaway
#34. It's so miserable and so easy to keep slamming Titanic
I'll shut up.
Peter Greenaway
#35. It's precisely on the Internet that the majority of the writing is terribly bad and uninteresting.
Peter Greenaway
#36. We can have our own choices in sex partners, but you cannot avoid birth and death. It's the content of all religion and art. We familiarize them and if we're more honest, we'd be far more relaxed about them.
Peter Greenaway
#39. My personal obsessions are much more interesting to me than other people's.
Peter Greenaway
#40. I don't have any particular wish to be polemical or didactic; I don't have a 'message', but what I do thoroughly enjoy are those works of art, not necessarily in the cinema, but in the other arts as well, which have an encyclopaedic world.
Peter Greenaway
#41. I don't think we've seen any cinema yet. I think we've seen 100 years of illustrated text.
Peter Greenaway
#42. I hear, "Yes,
Let us more education invest!"
Whilst destitute,
Outside their gates doth rest,
Women, children, and men,
Poor and a hungered!
Odd that colleges fill,
Yet mercy is numbered.
Kari L. Greenaway
#43. A woman once said to me, 'Any religion that is to be any good to one must be one they make for themselves,' - and it is so. She, curiously, was a clergyman's wife.
Kate Greenaway
#44. There is visual illiteracy with text-oriented films like bloody 'Harry Potter' and 'Lord of the Rings.' ...
Peter Greenaway
#45. Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward.
Peter Greenaway
#46. Oh blessed assurance,
Come down, make home with us.
Our hope is high for whats in store,
Come move these feet towards Love.
Kari L. Greenaway
#47. It doesn't matter what the technology is - no one will watch a Peter Greenaway film anyway.
Alan Parker
#48. We all live to a formula. Maybe the secret lies in keeping that formula secret.
Peter Greenaway
#49. I was born on the 5th April 1942. On Good Friday. Round about crucifixion time. Archbishop Ussher, a man for dates, who calculated that the world began on September 27th 4004 BC, says the crucifixion took place at three o'clock in the afternoon on Good Friday in the year 33 AD. I was right on time.
Peter Greenaway
#50. A French critic referred to me as a gay pessimist, with gay used in its older sense, and talked of Cocteau in the same breath.
Peter Greenaway
#51. 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
#52. I think that films or indeed any art work should be made in a way that they are infinitely viewable; so that you could go back to it time and time again, not necessarily immediately but over a space of time, and see new things in it, or new ways of looking at it.
Peter Greenaway
#54. 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
#55. There are those who think that Zeffirelli's Hamlet is the way to treat Shakespeare. I think that cinema can handle much more. We somehow expect cinema to provide us with meaning, to console us. But that's not the purpose of art.
Peter Greenaway
#56. 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
#57. I think my films are always quite self-reflexive and always question 'why am I doing this, is this the right way to do it, what is cinema for, does it have a purpose?'
Peter Greenaway
#58. 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.
Peter Greenaway
#59. I certainly don't believe you documentary filmmakers. Like me, you are involved in making fiction, and your fiction is just as well organized and just as well predicated, but the big difference between me and you is that I'm honest and you're dishonest. I know I'm telling you lies.
Peter Greenaway
#60. This is where I begin to do the writing. I am now going to be the pen and not the paper.
Peter Greenaway
#62. 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.
Peter Greenaway
#63. 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?
Peter Greenaway
#64. I do feel for me that cinema has somehow ceased to be a spectator sport. I get tremendous excitement out of making it rather than watching it.
Peter Greenaway
#65. That comes from most people having an American film model in their heads which is nothing but a total illusionary masturbatory massage.
Peter Greenaway
#66. 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
#67. I like to think of The Falls as my own personal encyclopedia Greenaway-ensis.
Peter Greenaway
#68. My second Christian name is John. Good solid bourgeois Christian name, like my first name, Peter, a rock. Minerals. Build on rock, rocks, uranium. Peter and John were two of the twelve apostles - arguable the two most significant. Were my parents hedging their bets?
Peter Greenaway
#69. I don't want to become an ivory tower filmmaker. That sounds peculiar, but I want to be a mainstream filmmaker. I want the largest possible audience that I can find - but, of course, on my terms.
Peter Greenaway
#70. There are, after all, approaches to be made other than the dependable routes that massage sentimental expectations and provide easy opportunities for emotional identification.
Peter Greenaway
#71. I have made it a rule for a long time, not to part with the copyright of my drawings, for I have been so copied, my drawings reproduced and sold for advertisements and done in ways I hate.
Kate Greenaway
#72. To be an atheist you have to have ten thousand times more imagination than if you are a religious fundamentalist. You must take the responsibility to acquire information, digest and use it to understand what you can.
Peter Greenaway
#73. A really intelligent man makes an indifferent painter. For painting requires a certain blindness, a partial refusal to be aware of all the options ...
Peter Greenaway
#74. I think it is really important to be in some way provocative
either intellectually or viscerally
in the films one makes.
Peter Greenaway
#75. 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.
Peter Greenaway
#77. 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.
Peter Greenaway
#78. If Good approved of his creature's creation, He breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His name.
Peter Greenaway
#79. We live in a time of excess - excess population, excess information.
Peter Greenaway
#80. 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
#81. Creation, to me, is to try to orchestrate the universe to understand what surrounds us. Even if, to accomplish that, we use all sorts of strategems which in the end prove completely incapable of staving off chaos.
Peter Greenaway
#82. Everyone seems possessed with the desire of writing articles upon me and sends me long lists of all I am to say.
Kate Greenaway
#83. If you're a Shakespeare fan, isn't that a way to negotiate sex and death?
Peter Greenaway
#84. There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.
Peter Greenaway
#85. As for critics, one mediocre writer is more valuable than ten good critics. They are like haughty, barren spinsters lodged in a maternity ward.
Peter Greenaway
#86. He stretches forth in our soul,
Teaches our arms how to reach.
Our feet He has shod,
With His gospel of peace.
Kari L. Greenaway
#87. I suppose I am gently cynical about notions of who we think we are, but I certainly don't hate my fellow man. I think my cinema, although it might often deal with death and decay, is highly celebratory.
Peter Greenaway
#88. In practically every film you experience, you can see the director following the text. Illustrating the words first, making the pictures after, and, alas, so often not making pictures at all, but holding up the camera to do its mimetic worst.
Peter Greenaway
#89. 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?
Peter Greenaway
#90. It serves the purpose of not serving a purpose, surely quite a valid one.
Peter Greenaway
#91. 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
#92. Sometimes a person can be more traumatized than he knows.
R.M. Greenaway
#93. 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
#94. We don't need virtual reality, we need virtual unreality.
Peter Greenaway
#95. Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.
Peter Greenaway
#96. I have always had severe problems with Austrians ... Musical, churchy, uptight ... nice legs ... hypocritical ... authoritarian ... always insist their dustbins are very clean.
Peter Greenaway
#97. I really, sincerely believe that one should trust the work, and not the author.
Peter Greenaway
#98. I share this interest in the weird, strange, unusual, surreal.
Peter Greenaway
#99. 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
#100. You can play lacrosse all over the world provided you know where the goalposts are.
Peter Greenaway
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