Peter Greenaway Quotes

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Peter Greenaway

Profession : Director

Birth : April 5, 1942

Religion is there to say, 'Hey, you don't have to worry - there's an afterlife.'

Peter Greenaway

Whether you're Godard or Almodovar or Scorsese, it's text, text, text. Everything begins with the text, and this is a source of great anguish to me. So please let cinema get on with doing what it does best, which is expressing ideas in visual terms.

Peter Greenaway

Most people are visually illiterate. Most people don't understand images: they don't understand how to interpret them or how to manufacture them.

Peter Greenaway

As for critics, one mediocre writer is more valuable than ten good critics. They are like haughty, barren spinsters lodged in a maternity ward.

Peter Greenaway

Everything I try to do wants to be able to push communication through the notion of the visual image.

Peter Greenaway

For 8,000 years, we've had lyric poetry; for 400 years we've had the novel: theatre hands its meaning down in text. Let's find a medium whose total, sole responsibility is the world as seen as a form of visual intelligence. Surely, surely, surely the cinema should be that phenomenon.

Peter Greenaway

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

Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward.

Peter Greenaway

I think that every artist dreams of renewing the forms which came before, but I think very few can be considered to have achieved that. We are all dwarves standing upon the shoulders of the giants who preceded us, and I think we must never forget that. After all, even iconoclasts only exist with respect to that which they destroy.

Peter Greenaway

All religions have always hated females.

Peter Greenaway

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

Peter Greenaway

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

Peter Greenaway

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.

Peter Greenaway

I've always been fascinated by Eisenstein.

Peter Greenaway

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.

Peter Greenaway

I don't want to be a film-maker. I think painting is far more exciting and profound.

Peter Greenaway

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

Peter Greenaway

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

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

English culture is highly literary-based.

Peter Greenaway