Peter Greenaway Quotes

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

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

Churchill was a good writer but a bad historian.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Investigation is never complete.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

My heroes among filmmakers would be people like Buñuel and Pasolini, who were of very high cinematic intelligence, but tread on a lot of toes.

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

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.

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

Too many proofs spoil the truth.

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

It seems so tragic to me that so many filmmakers are making movies up against this extra-ordinary revolution with one eye closed and two hands tied behind their backs.

Continuity is boring.

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?

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.

Itch to read, scratch to understand.

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.

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

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

All religions have always hated females.

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

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

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

Imagine a world where nothing is stable. In the West, we have three moving elements -- Air, Fire, Water -- but at least we can depend on the fourth.

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

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.