110+ Peter Greenaway Quotes On Education, Art And Visually Arresting.

Peter Greenaway is a British film director, screenwriter, and artist. He is known for his distinctively formal, highly stylized films which often feature lush cinematography, a wide range of cultural references, and a tendency to critique traditional European customs and values. His most successful films include The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), and The Pillow Book (1996). Following is our collection on famous quotes by Peter Greenaway on education, life, art.

Top 10 Peter Greenaway Quotes

1. 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.
2. I have always had severe problems with Austrians. ... Musical, churchy, uptight... nice legs... hypocritical... authoritarian... always insist their dustbins are very clean.
3. I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing.
4. Every historian has a vested interest. "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" was not about the Roman but the British empire. What price the truth?
5. I always think that art is one of the most wonderful exciting curious ways to learn. I have no worries or apologies about art being used as a teaching medium.
6. Only cinema narrows its concern down to its content, that is to its story. It should, instead, concern itself with its form, its structure.
7. Most cinema is not about images but text. Why on earth have we based cinema on text? Why can't we break that umbilical cord? Why do we have to pollute cinema?
8. As for critics, one mediocre writer is more valuable than ten good critics. They are like haughty, barren spinsters lodged in a maternity ward.
9. I want to regard my public as infinitely intelligent, as understanding notions of the suspension of disbelief and as realising all the time that this is not a slice of life, this is openly a film.
10. I am certain that there are two things in life which are dependable: the delights of the flesh and the delights of literature. I have had the good fortune to enjoy them both equally.

Peter Greenaway Short Quotes

• We don't need virtual reality, we need virtual unreality.
• American actors are coy. We all have pricks and cunts, or are you different from the rest of us?
• If you're a Shakespeare fan, isn't that a way to negotiate sex and death?
• Painting is the supreme form of expression; you don't need to 'read' painting.
• Continuity is boring.
• I like to think of The Falls as my own personal encyclopedia Greenaway-ensis.
• Investigation is never complete.
• Whispering can be a rest from a noisy world of words.
• This is where I begin to do the writing. I am now going to be the pen and not the paper.
• The best painting is totally non-narrative. It doesn't have to tell you a story.

Peter Greenaway Quotes About Life

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

If Good approved of his creature's creation, He breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His name. — Peter Greenaway

I have transmitted genetic material, all I have to do between my daughters' birth and my death is to decorate my life. — Peter Greenaway

What do you want art to give you? What do you want cultural experience to give you? Shouldn't it be in-depth, profound experiences which have some satisfaction and can be retained in your four senses and your imagination for the rest of your life? — 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

Peter Greenaway Quotes About Art

I think that films or indeed any art work should be made in a way that they are infinitely viewable; so that you could go back to it time and time again, not necessarily immediately but over a space of time, and see new things in it, or new ways of looking at it. — Peter Greenaway

We can have our own choices in sex partners, but you cannot avoid birth and death. It's the content of all religion and art. We familiarize them and if we're more honest, we'd be far more relaxed about them. — Peter Greenaway

I went to art school, and every Tuesday and Friday we drew the nude. If you look at Western painting, male and female nudes are in the center of every painting. It's difficult and exciting to draw the nude. Why get so upset about this? It's our duty to break taboos. — Peter Greenaway

There are those who think that Zeffirelli's Hamlet is the way to treat Shakespeare. I think that cinema can handle much more. We somehow expect cinema to provide us with meaning, to console us. But that's not the purpose of art. — Peter Greenaway

Works of art are never finished, just stopped. — Peter Greenaway

I don't have any particular wish to be polemical or didactic; I don't have a 'message', but what I do thoroughly enjoy are those works of art, not necessarily in the cinema, but in the other arts as well, which have an encyclopaedic world. — Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway Famous Quotes And Sayings

I would be curious about one of those Jane Austen women - you know - long-suffering, dutiful - but all right in the end - a plump 19th century type, five foot four, ringlets, brown eyes, long fingers. — Peter Greenaway

Creation, to me, is to try to orchestrate the universe to understand what surrounds us. Even if, to accomplish that, we use all sorts of strategems which in the end prove completely incapable of staving off chaos. — Peter Greenaway

The pretence that numbers are not the humble creation of man, but are the exacting language of the Universe and therefore possess the secret of all things, is comforting, terrifying and mesmeric. — Peter Greenaway

If you never lived out your sexuality - it's a great force, and if you try to fight it, what does that create? Energy: positive and negative, self-loathing. — Peter Greenaway

There is visual illiteracy with text-oriented films like bloody 'Harry Potter' and 'Lord of the Rings.'. — Peter Greenaway

The game Flights of Fancy or Reverse Strip Jump is played from as high a jumping-point as a competitor will dare. After each successful jump, the competitor is allowing to put on an article of clothing. Thirteen jumps is normally more than enough to see a competitor fully dressed for the day. — Peter Greenaway

I think my films are very English. That certain emotional distance, interest in the world, interest in irony. These are all deeply English propositions. — Peter Greenaway

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. — Peter Greenaway

Churchill was a good writer but a bad historian. — Peter Greenaway

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

I've always been fascinated by Eisenstein. — 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

There's more religion in my little finger than there is in the pope. But no, I don't believe in God. I am an athiest. A Darwinian evolutionist. — 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

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

I certainly don't believe you documentary filmmakers. Like me, you are involved in making fiction, and your fiction is just as well organized and just as well predicated, but the big difference between me and you is that I'm honest and you're dishonest. I know I'm telling you lies. — 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

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

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past. — 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

My audience is comprised of three categories. The first category contains the people who decide after the first five minutes that they've made a mistake and leave. The second category is the people who give the film a chance and leave annoyed after 40 minutes. The third category includes the people that watch the whole film and return to see it again. If I'm able to persuade 33% of the audience to stay, then I can say that I've succeeded. — Peter Greenaway

I always think that if you deal with extremely emotional, even melodramatic, subject matter, as I constantly do, the best way to handle those situations is at a sufficient remove. It's like a doctor and a nurse and a casualty situation. You can't help the patient and you can't help yourself by emoting. And I don't think cinema is intended for therapy, so I object also to that huge, massive manipulation which is perpetrated on the public. — Peter Greenaway

Bill Viola is worth ten Scorseses. — Peter Greenaway

I obviously irritate people. I obviously antagonise them. — Peter Greenaway

Cinema is dead, long live cinema. — 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

Many quite popular films are filled with violence. I think the difference between those and my films is that I show the cause and effect of violent activity. It's not a Donald Duck situation where he get a brick in the back of the head and gets up and walks away in the next frame. Mine have violence which keeps Donald Duck in the hospital for six months and creates a trauma which he will remember for the rest of his life. — Peter Greenaway

I don't believe that one has to tear down the cinema screen in order to renew cinema. But new input and new energy are lacking. They are flowing above all into the television technologies. We must, therefore, concentrate on the CD-ROM. — Peter Greenaway

Words reproduce themselves pleasurably too. — Peter Greenaway

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

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

Too many proofs spoil the truth. — Peter Greenaway

English culture is highly literary-based. — Peter Greenaway

It seems to me that dominant cinema seems to require an empathy or a sympathy between the film and the audience which is basically to do with the manipulation of the emotions and it seems to me again -- and this is a very subjective position -- that most cinema seems to trivialise the emotions, sentimentalising or romanticising them. — Peter Greenaway

I imagine if you had built the Newton Memorial outside Paris ... it would have undoubtedly shown the violence of 1870 and 1914 and 1942 and 1945 - even 1968! Consider building a vast cube of stone merely to register the effects of violence - marked and dated as an indictment. — Peter Greenaway

In practically every film you experience, you can see the director following the text. Illustrating the words first, making the pictures after, and, alas, so often not making pictures at all, but holding up the camera to do its mimetic worst. — Peter Greenaway

Cinema has reached a dead end. — Peter Greenaway

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

I was continually connected with the whole world and never got any rest. At the moment, I spend only a few hours weekly on the net, that's just better for me. — Peter Greenaway

A hand cannot write on itself. — Peter Greenaway

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

One of my heroes, almost necessarily from what I'm saying, of course, is Borges, who is a supreme master of doing thing -- being a data bank -- and the beauty of this economy is that he could have written War and Peace in three or four pages; who knows, it might have been a better book. — Peter Greenaway

To be an atheist you have to have ten thousand times more imagination than if you are a religious fundamentalist. You must take the responsibility to acquire information, digest and use it to understand what you can. — Peter Greenaway

The range of human skin colours is quite narrow when you think about it - and I do - and subtle - beige, pink, white, tan, taup. — 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

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. — Peter Greenaway

I loved Latin -- the grammar, the difficult tenses, the history -- but for some reason I was very bad at it, shamefully and blushingly bad at it. ... In moments of stress the embarrassment of how bad I was at Latin -- a subject I loved -- really hit me. It was like being laughed at by someone you desperately loved. — Peter Greenaway

I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself. — Peter Greenaway

We all know that we're going to die, but we don't know when. That's not a blessing, that's a curse. — Peter Greenaway

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

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

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. — 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

There are, after all, approaches to be made other than the dependable routes that massage sentimental expectations and provide easy opportunities for emotional identification. — 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

I still would like you to feel the enthusiasm that all those people felt in the twenties and thirties, that indeed we had discovered, with cinema, the great 20th-century, all-embracing medium. — Peter Greenaway

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. — Peter Greenaway

I really, sincerely believe that one should trust the work, and not the author. — Peter Greenaway

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. — Peter Greenaway

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. — Peter Greenaway

What are you - some kind of addict? Is this where you come to. — Peter Greenaway

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. — Peter Greenaway

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

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

I share this interest in the weird, strange, unusual, surreal. — Peter Greenaway

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

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

The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible. — Peter Greenaway

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

I don't want to be a film-maker. I think painting is far more exciting and profound. It's always at the back of my mind - let's give up this silly business of film-making and concentrate on something more satisfying and worthwhile. — 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

Blind eyes cannot read. — Peter Greenaway

An American critic wrote that she would rather be forced to read the New York telephone directory three times than watch the film A Zed and Two Noughts, a third of which was a homage to Vermeer. Conceivably, if you are a list-enthusiast like me, the New York telephone directory might be fascinating, demographically, geographically, historically, typographically, cartographically; but I am sure no compliment was intended. — Peter Greenaway

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? — Peter Greenaway

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

The start of a film is like a gateway, a formal entrance-point. The first three minutes of a film make great demands on an audience's patience and credulity. A great deal has to be learnt very rapidly about place and attitude, character and intent and ambition. — Peter Greenaway

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. — Peter Greenaway

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

Itch to read, scratch to understand. — Peter Greenaway

My favourite film-maker west of the English Channel is not English - but to me doesn't seem American either - David Lynch - a curious American-European film-maker. He has - against odds - achieved what we want to achieve here. He takes great risks with a strong personal voice and adequate funds and space to exercise it. I thought Blue Velvet was a masterpiece. — Peter Greenaway

All religions have always hated females. — Peter Greenaway

Here was opportunity to make an audience walk and move, be sociable in a way never dreamed of by the rigors of cinema-watching, in circumstances where many different perspectives could be brought to bear on a series of phenomena associated with the topics under consideration. Yet all the time it was a subjective creation under the auspices of light and sound, dealing with a large slice of cinema's vocabulary. — Peter Greenaway

Cinema is not a playground for Sharon Stone. — Peter Greenaway

I acknowledge Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. They are prostlytizers of English socialism preaching to the converted and telling us what we already know. Cinema is best served away from documentary neo-realism. I come from a tradition of post-post-Italian neo-realism in England, where we've produced the best television in the world. But to paraphrase Truffaut, the English have no visual imagination. — Peter Greenaway

Life Lessons by Peter Greenaway

1. Peter Greenaway's work emphasizes the importance of visual storytelling, often utilizing unconventional techniques to create a unique and captivating cinematic experience.
2. His films often explore themes of identity, mortality, and the power of art, emphasizing the importance of considering the world in a new and creative way.
3. Greenaway's films demonstrate the power of cinema to challenge our preconceptions and to stimulate thought and discussion.