Derek Jarman Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea. Understand that your morality is not law. Understand that we are you. Understand that if we decide to have sex whether safe, safer, or unsafe, it is our decision and you have no rights in our lovemaking.

Derek Jarman
On December 22, 1986, finding I was body positive, I set myself a target: I would disclose my secret and survive Margaret Thatcher. I did. Now I have set my sights on the millennium and a world where we are all equal.

Derek Jarman
People say to me, "You make fantastic films" and I say, "No, I make documentaries."

Derek Jarman
Dear William Shakespeare. I am a 14 year old and I'm queer like you. I'm learning art. I wanted to be a queer artist like Leonardo or Michaelangelo. But I like Francis Bacon best I read Alan Ginsberg, Rimbaud. I like Tchaikovsky, if I make films I will make them like Eisenstein, Murnau, Pasolini, Visconti. Love from Derek.

Derek Jarman
Paradise haunts gardens, and some gardens are paradises. Mine is one of them. Others are like bad children – spoilt by their parents, over-watered and covered with noxious chemicals.

Derek Jarman
Now is the time of departure. The last streamer that ties us to what is known, parts. We drift into a sea of storms.

Derek Jarman
All men are homosexual, some turn straight. It must be very odd to be a straight man because your sexuality is hopelessly defensive. It's like an ideal of racial purity.

Derek Jarman
The modern queer was invented by Tennessee Williams. Brando in blue jeans, sneakers, white T-shirt and leather jacket. When you saw that, you knew they were available.

Derek Jarman
The Last Of England works with image and sound, a language which is nearer to poetry than prose. It tells its story quite happily in silent images, in contrast to a word-bound cinema....

Derek Jarman
I'm not afraid of death but I am afraid of dying. Pain can be alleviated by morphine but the pain of social ostracism cannot be taken away.

Derek Jarman
An orgasm joins you to the past. Its timelessness becomes the brotherhood; the brethren are lovers; they extend the 'family'. I share that sexuality. It was then, is now and will be in the future.

Derek Jarman
The queers of the sixties, like those since, have connived with their repression under a veneer of respectability. Good mannered city queens in suits and pinstripes, so busy establishing themselves, were useless at changing anything.

Derek Jarman
I wouldn't wish the eighties on anyone, it was the time when all that was rotten bubbled to the surface. If you were not at the receiving end of this mayhem you could be unaware of it.

Derek Jarman
The slow-witted approach to the HIV epidemic was the result of a thousand years of Christian malpractice and the childlike approach of the church to sexuality. If any single man was responsible, it was Augustine of Hippo who murdered his way to sainthood spouting on about the sins located in his genitals.

Derek Jarman