Peter Greenaway Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

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
On the other hand, I view the whole matter from a cosmic perspective. I don't take a position. I believe that there are no more positions to take, no certainties, no facts. Many people find this confusing about my films; they say I am hiding out behind irony. But from a cosmic viewpoint, it is eternally unimportant whether one lives or not.

Peter Greenaway
Counting makes even hideous events bearable as simply more of the same — the counting of wedding-rings, spectacles, teeth and bodies disassociates them from their context — to make the ultimate obscene blasphemy of bureaucratic insensitivity. Engage the mind with numbing recitation to make it empty of reaction.

Peter Greenaway
You see how even an illness can be romanticized. Tuberculosis got the treatment: Keats, the Lady of the Camellias, the foggy dew, and so on. We must make romantic literature out of cancer — can you imagine that?

Peter Greenaway
I cannot keep a clock or a watch. They stop on me. Why won't time stay peacefully on my wrist? Is time not interested in me any more because I am dying?

Peter Greenaway
In the game of Dawn Card-Castles, fifty-two playing cards are stacked up into a castle in a draught-free space: the player can determine the dreams of the next night if he awakes before the castle collapses. Those players who wish to dream of Romance build their castle with the seven of hearts.

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

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

Peter Greenaway
Jean Renoir once suggested that most true creators have only one idea and spend their lives reworking it, but then very rapidly he added that most people don't have any ideas at all, so one idea is pretty amazing.

Peter Greenaway
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.

Peter Greenaway
Look, it was an accident. Five thousand accidents happen every day — bizarre, tragic, farcical... they're Acts of God fit only to amaze the survivors and irritate the Insurance Company...

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

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

Peter Greenaway
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
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
It could be said now that all animals live in zoos, whether it is a zoo in Regent's Park, London or a Nigerian Game Reserve. Perhaps what's left to argue is only the zoo's quality.

Peter Greenaway
Film is such an extraordinary rich medium which can handle so many different modes of operation, combining together in the same place all these extraordinary disciplines which may be executed in their own right — music, writing, picture making of all kinds, and I often feel that some filmmakers make films with one eye closed and two hands tied behind their backs.

Peter Greenaway
The game of Bees in the Trees is a variant of musical chairs and is best played with funeral music and in the open air. The object of the game is to sit down on a vacant chair when the music stops. If the chair sat in is occupied by bees, it is permissible to arrange a professional foul.

Peter Greenaway
As you probably know, I'm often accused of intellectual exhibitionism and all forms of elitism. Although I can understand this point of view, it's a rather wasted argument because, if we regard areas of information as being elite and therefore somehow not usable, it means our centre-ground of activity becomes very, very impoverished.

Peter Greenaway
Cinema is dead. I can give you a date - it died on the 31st of September, 1983, when the zapper or the remote control was introduced to the livings rooms of the world. Bang! That's the end.

Peter Greenaway
Sir Isaac Newton, the subject of this cake, is in every Englishman's wallet... he's on the English one-pound note. I always carry one on me for good luck. A man who discovered gravity and thus successfully secured our feet on the ground is a good companion. In fixing us to the earth, he enabled us — with equanimity — to permit our heads to remain in the clouds.

Peter Greenaway
All my films are somewhat experimental, they are all, each one, taking a certain amount of risk, but there's always the basic assumption that we should be able to appreciate the cinema as much with the mind as we can through emotional empathy. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Peter Greenaway
I'm an excuse for medical experiments and art theory. You must get me out of here and out of the hospital.

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

Peter Greenaway
Human relationships are patterned and cross-patterned and restricted and limited and de-limited and caged and freed again by the elaborate conventions, rules, and games we call Civilization … the rules and the games are often absurd and farcical — sometimes they are tragic — yet we tacitly acknowledge that they are necessary.

Peter Greenaway