Top 100 Peter Greenaway Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Itch to read, scratch to understand.”

— Peter Greenaway

52. “Blind eyes cannot read.”

— Peter Greenaway

53. “I think it is really important to be in some way provocative – either intellectually or viscerally – in the films one makes.”

— Peter Greenaway

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

— Peter Greenaway

55. “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.”

— Peter Greenaway

56. “Bill Viola is worth ten Scorseses.”

— Peter Greenaway

57. “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

58. “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

59. “I really, sincerely believe that one should trust the work, and not the author.”

— Peter Greenaway

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “I am Welsh by birth, English by education, and European by nature.”

— Peter Greenaway

66. “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

67. “I do indeed think that cinema is mortal. There is a lot of evidence already that it is dying on its feet.”

— Peter Greenaway

68. “It’s precisely on the Internet that the majority of the writing is terribly bad and uninteresting.”

— Peter Greenaway

69. “It serves the purpose of not serving a purpose, surely quite a valid one.”

— Peter Greenaway

70. “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

71. “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

72. “The best painting is totally non-narrative. It doesn’t have to tell you a story.”

— Peter Greenaway

73. “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

74. “I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself.”

— Peter Greenaway

75. “This is where I begin to do the writing. I am now going to be the pen and not the paper.”

— Peter Greenaway

76. “I like a lot of glasses about – it highers the tone.”

— Peter Greenaway

77. “Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward.”

— Peter Greenaway

78. “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

79. “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

80. “We all live to a formula. Maybe the secret lies in keeping that formula secret.”

— Peter Greenaway

81. “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

82. “Cinema is not a playground for Sharon Stone.”

— Peter Greenaway

83. “My favourite way of watching the cinema is the biggest possible cinema you can find, with the biggest possible screen, and the loudest possible Dolby – but just me. Nobody else.”

— Peter Greenaway

84. “I got in trouble with the stern-faced Russians who didn’t want me to create a guy who is mortal.”

— Peter Greenaway

85. “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

86. “I can’t think of anyone who has done anything remotely useful after the age of 80.”

— Peter Greenaway

87. “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

88. “All religions have always hated females.”

— Peter Greenaway

89. “My personal obsessions are much more interesting to me than other people’s.”

— Peter Greenaway

90. “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.”

— Peter Greenaway

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

— Peter Greenaway

92. “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

93. “We are all united by the phenomenon that we have a body and that body is universally the same, more or less. If we lose sight of that perspective, everything can desperately suffer.”

— Peter Greenaway

94. “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

95. “Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn’t get read.”

— Peter Greenaway

96. “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

97. “Words reproduce themselves pleasurably too.”

— Peter Greenaway

98. “I am certain that there are two things in life which are dependable, the delights of the flesh and the delights of literature.”

— Peter Greenaway

99. “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

100. “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