Top 100 Peter Greenaway Quotes

#1. Too many proofs spoil the truth.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #4803
#2. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #26187
#3. I think it is really important to be in some way provocative
either intellectually or viscerally
in the films one makes.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #56980
#4. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #70070
#5. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #72359
#6. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #106823
#7. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #110428
#8. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #165665
#9. I like to think of The Falls as my own personal encyclopedia Greenaway-ensis.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #167483
#10. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #170316
#11. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #171750
#12. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #193523
#13. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #198337
#14. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #260850
#15. English culture is highly literary-based.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #269204
#16. This is where I begin to do the writing. I am now going to be the pen and not the paper.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #304060
#17. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #323327
#18. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #342106
#19. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #349213
#20. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #363031
#21. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #383621
#22. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #384970
#23. Whispering can be a rest from a noisy world of words.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #390965
#24. That comes from most people having an American film model in their heads which is nothing but a total illusionary masturbatory massage.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #398985
#25. You can play lacrosse all over the world provided you know where the goalposts are.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #424847
#26. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #460625
#27. I share this interest in the weird, strange, unusual, surreal.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #460812
#28. I really, sincerely believe that one should trust the work, and not the author.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #465586
#29. I have always had severe problems with Austrians ... Musical, churchy, uptight ... nice legs ... hypocritical ... authoritarian ... always insist their dustbins are very clean.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #490066
#30. Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #533043
#31. We don't need virtual reality, we need virtual unreality.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #533680
#32. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #543885
#33. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #591274
#34. It serves the purpose of not serving a purpose, surely quite a valid one.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #605472
#35. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #620835
#36. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #674740
#37. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #724913
#38. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #765365
#39. There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #769915
#40. If you're a Shakespeare fan, isn't that a way to negotiate sex and death?

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #787184
#41. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #788102
#42. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #792731
#43. We live in a time of excess - excess population, excess information.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #826002
#44. If Good approved of his creature's creation, He breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His name.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #843204
#45. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #854744
#46. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #864946
#47. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #881718
#48. I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #887192
#49. Blind eyes cannot read.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #888247
#50. All religions have always hated females.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #895955
#51. Investigation is never complete.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #907051
#52. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #936716
#53. I do indeed think that cinema is mortal. There is a lot of evidence already that it is dying on its feet.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #981879
#54. Anybody who writes a diary insists it must be read by someone else.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #983689
#55. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1053323
#56. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1073946
#57. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1083288
#58. Works of art are never finished, just stopped.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1117203
#59. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1123235
#60. I can't think of anyone who has done anything remotely useful after the age of 80.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1128801
#61. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1133607
#62. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1164132
#63. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1173985
#64. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1215994
#65. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1217321
#66. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1218766
#67. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1224249
#68. We all live to a formula. Maybe the secret lies in keeping that formula secret.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1224443
#69. It doesn't matter what the technology is - no one will watch a Peter Greenaway film anyway.

Alan Parker

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1228326
#70. Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1241940
#71. There is visual illiteracy with text-oriented films like bloody 'Harry Potter' and 'Lord of the Rings.' ...

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1254539
#72. I don't think we've seen any cinema yet. I think we've seen 100 years of illustrated text.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1271650
#73. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1289910
#74. My personal obsessions are much more interesting to me than other people's.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1305182
#75. Cinema has reached a dead end.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1305990
#76. Cinema is not a playground for Sharon Stone.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1319791
#77. Itch to read, scratch to understand.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1341138
#78. American actors are coy. We all have pricks and cunts, or are you different from the rest of us?

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1345954
#79. Painting is the supreme form of expression; you don't need to 'read' painting.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1370845
#80. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1373510
#81. I've always been fascinated by Eisenstein.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1377651
#82. I don't want to be a film-maker. I think painting is far more exciting and profound.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1388617
#83. It's precisely on the Internet that the majority of the writing is terribly bad and uninteresting.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1392447
#84. There are basically only two subject matters in all Western culture: sex and death. We do have some ability to manipulate sex nowadays. We have no ability, and never will have, to manipulate death.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1402752
#85. Continuity is boring.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1424384
#86. If you want to tell stories, be a writer, not a filmmaker.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1427958
#87. 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.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1444714
#88. All the material is fictional and develops its own eight and a half private, coelesced journeys, where, perhaps not unexpectedly, the females can run faster than the men and trade their freedoms by exhausting the male sexual fantasies and replacing them by some of their own.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1448629
#89. A hand cannot write on itself.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1486692
#90. The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1506479
#91. I like a lot of glasses about
it highers the tone.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1526307
#92. I am Welsh by birth, English by education, and European by nature.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1542868
#93. For so many filmmakers, cinema is a means to an end.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1543824
#94. 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1593034
#95. 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.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1615290
#96. I have transmitted genetic material, all I have to do between my daughters' birth and my death is to decorate my life.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1619380
#97. I imagine if you had built the Newton Memorial outside Paris ... it would have undoubtedly shown the violence of 1870 and 1914 and 1942 and 1945 - even 1968! Consider building a vast cube of stone merely to register the effects of violence - marked and dated as an indictment.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1637683
#98. Bill Viola is worth ten Scorseses.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1646106
#99. I don't believe in the deplorable notion of realism in the cinema: you can over-reach it, and it becomes as false as convention.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1651863
#100. Cinema is dead, long live cinema.

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Quotes #1652134

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