Top 100 Peter Greenaway Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Cinema is dead, long live cinema.”

— Peter Greenaway

2. “We don’t need virtual reality, we need virtual unreality.”

— Peter Greenaway

3. “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

4. “Continuity is boring.”

— Peter Greenaway

5. “We live in a time of excess – excess population, excess information.”

— Peter Greenaway

6. “Too many proofs spoil the truth.”

— Peter Greenaway

7. “There’s no such thing as history, only historians. That’s how we know about the past.”

— Peter Greenaway

8. “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

9. “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?”

— Peter Greenaway

10. “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

11. “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?”

— Peter Greenaway

12. “I like to think of The Falls as my own personal encyclopedia Greenaway-ensis.”

— Peter Greenaway

13. “If Good approved of his creature’s creation, He breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His name.”

— Peter Greenaway

14. “Works of art are never finished, just stopped.”

— Peter Greenaway

15. “Cinema has reached a dead end.”

— Peter Greenaway

16. “I don’t want to be a film-maker. I think painting is far more exciting and profound.”

— Peter Greenaway

17. “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

18. “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

19. “Cinema is far too rich and capable a medium to be merely left to the storytellers.”

— Peter Greenaway

20. “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

21. “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

22. “I was born on the 5th April 1942. On Good Friday. Round about crucifixion time. Archbishop Ussher, a man for dates, who calculated that the world began on September 27th 4004 BC, says the crucifixion took place at three o’clock in the afternoon on Good Friday in the year 33 AD. I was right on time.”

— Peter Greenaway

23. “Investigation is never complete.”

— Peter Greenaway

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “I never go to the cinema. I can’t stand sitting in the dark with strangers – all of us obliged to share the same emotional experiences – it’s too intimate. I like to be emotional in private.”

— Peter Greenaway

30. “The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education – it lays out all the early books of the Bible.”

— Peter Greenaway

31. “I share this interest in the weird, strange, unusual, surreal.”

— Peter Greenaway

32. “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

33. “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

34. “I obviously irritate people. I obviously antagonise them.”

— Peter Greenaway

35. “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

36. “I don’t think we’ve seen any cinema yet. I think we’ve seen 100 years of illustrated text.”

— Peter Greenaway

37. “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

38. “I admit that death is not just about you, it’s also about the people who love you.”

— Peter Greenaway

39. “You can play lacrosse all over the world provided you know where the goalposts are.”

— Peter Greenaway

40. “Painting is the supreme form of expression; you don’t need to ‘read’ painting.”

— Peter Greenaway

41. “My second Christian name is John. Good solid bourgeois Christian name, like my first name, Peter, a rock. Minerals. Build on rock, rocks, uranium. Peter and John were two of the twelve apostles – arguable the two most significant. Were my parents hedging their bets?”

— Peter Greenaway

42. “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

43. “Whispering can be a rest from a noisy world of words.”

— Peter Greenaway

44. “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

45. “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 bring them together and enjoy them together in full quantity.”

— Peter Greenaway

46. “A hand cannot write on itself.”

— Peter Greenaway

47. “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

48. “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

49. “If you want to tell stories, be a writer, not a filmmaker.”

— Peter Greenaway

50. “English culture is highly literary-based.”

— Peter Greenaway