Words matter. These are the best Peter Greenaway Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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?’
Most people are visually illiterate. Most people don’t understand images: they don’t understand how to interpret them or how to manufacture them.
We have to change the educational curricula and put a lot more emphasis on how important seeing and looking is.
I admit that death is not just about you, it’s also about the people who love you.
The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education – it lays out all the early books of the Bible.
Thanks to secondary education and the Internet, we’re all knowledgeable now – if knowledge means the accumulation of facts. Curators are those who know how to maneuver around that knowledge.
I can’t think of anyone who has done anything remotely useful after the age of 80.
My biggest critical success was ‘The Draughtsman’s Contract,’ but then it wasn’t the English who particularly thought so; it was the French, who are much more interested in Cartesian logic: in finding your way through more cerebral puzzle-making, if you wish.
If you want to tell stories, be a writer, not a filmmaker.
Cinema ceases to be passive and becomes active: you, the audience, are now, in some senses, in charge of the filmmaking process. You have all got mobile phones, you have all got cam recorders, and you’ve all got laptops, so you’re all filmmakers.
For 8,000 years, we’ve had lyric poetry; for 400 years we’ve had the novel: theatre hands its meaning down in text. Let’s find a medium whose total, sole responsibility is the world as seen as a form of visual intelligence. Surely, surely, surely the cinema should be that phenomenon.
Religion is there to say, ‘Hey, you don’t have to worry – there’s an afterlife.’
It’s very difficult to understand, but I’m looking for a nonnarrative, multiscreen, present-tense cinema. Narrative is an artifact created by us. It does not exist at all in nature; it is a construct made by us, and I wonder whether we need the narrative anymore.
I don’t want to be a film-maker. I think painting is far more exciting and profound.
All really worthwhile artists, creators, use the technology of their time, and anybody who doesn’t becomes immediately a fossil.
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.
I’m a Darwinian.
For so many filmmakers, cinema is a means to an end.
English culture is highly literary-based.
We do not need a text-based cinema… we need an image-based cinema.
It’s a big criticism of Greenaway films that they are far too interested in formalism and not enough interested in notions of emotional content. It’s a criticism I can fully understand from a public that has been brought up by Hollywood movies that demand intense emotional rapport.
I’m sorry – you know, culture is elitist. Culture has to be elitist: it’s about seeing and knowing and about knowledge.
We all know that we’re going to die, but we don’t know when. That’s not a blessing, that’s a curse.
I want to be a prime creator – as every self-regarding artist should do.
I obviously irritate people. I obviously antagonise them.
