Peter Greenaway quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Peter Greenaway on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

Anybody who writes a diary insists it must be read by someone else.

Investigation is never complete.

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

Bill Viola is worth ten Scorseses.

Too many proofs spoil the truth.

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

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

If you want to tell stories, be a writer, not a filmmaker.

I like to think of The Falls as my own personal encyclopedia Greenaway-ensis.

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

All religions have always hated females.

My personal obsessions are much more interesting to me than other people's.

I got in trouble with the stern-faced Russians who didn't want me to create a guy who is mortal.

I am Welsh by birth, English by education, and European by nature.

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

Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.

Itch to read, scratch to understand.

I've always been fascinated by Eisenstein.

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

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

I like a lot of glasses about
it highers the tone.

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

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

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.

American actors are coy. We all have pricks and cunts, or are you different from the rest of us?

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

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

I don't want to be a film-maker. I think painting is far more exciting and profound.

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

Cinema is not a playground for Sharon Stone.

I don't think we've seen any cinema yet. I think we've seen 100 years of illustrated text.

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

A really intelligent man makes an indifferent painter. For painting requires a certain blindness, a partial refusal to be aware of all the options ...

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.

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

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.

English culture is highly literary-based.

I think it is really important to be in some way provocative
either intellectually or viscerally
in the films one makes.

We all know that we're going to die, but we don't know when. That's not a blessing, that's a curse.

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

I do indeed think that cinema is mortal. There is a lot of evidence already that it is dying on its feet.

Cinema is dead, long live cinema.

For so many filmmakers, cinema is a means to an end.

Painting is the supreme form of expression; you don't need to 'read' painting.

I can't think of anyone who has done anything remotely useful after the age of 80.

It's precisely on the Internet that the majority of the writing is terribly bad and uninteresting.

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.

A hand cannot write on itself.

I admit that death is not just about you, it's also about the people who love you.

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

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

Works of art are never finished, just stopped.

We live in a time of excess - excess population, excess information.

Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward.

Cinema has reached a dead end.

If you're a Shakespeare fan, isn't that a way to negotiate sex and death?

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

If every man is supposed to think of sex once every nine minutes, what on earth does he think of in the other eight?

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.

Continuity is boring.

This is where I begin to do the writing. I am now going to be the pen and not the paper.

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

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

Blind eyes cannot read.

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.

Churchill was a good writer but a bad historian.