Peter Greenaway Short Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
We don't need books to make films. It's the last thing we want – it turns cinema into the bastard art of illustration.

Peter Greenaway
I sit here for hours. It's like sitting amongst lighthouses, each lighthouse giving you a bearing on lost spaces of time...

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

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
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
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
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
I've always been fascinated by maps and cartography. A map tells you where you've been, where you are, and where you're going — in a sense it's three tenses in one.

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
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
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
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
There are basically only two subject matters in all Western culture: sex and death. We do have some ability to manipulate sex nowadays. We have no ability, and never will have, to manipulate death.

Peter Greenaway
Americans don't understand what metaphor in cinema is about. They're extremely good at making straightforward, linear narrative movies, which entertain superbly. But they very rarely do anything else.

Peter Greenaway