It's very difficult to understand, but I'm looking for a nonnarrative, multiscreen, present-tense cinema. Narrative is an artifact created by us. It does not exist at all in nature; it is a construct made by us, and I wonder whether we need the narrative anymore.

Peter Greenaway

Nature Art Wonder

We do not need a text-based cinema... we need an image-based cinema.

Peter Greenaway

Age Text T

I've always been fascinated by Eisenstein.

Peter Greenaway

Ways Way Ted

I believe there's no such thing as history; there's only historians, and in English, we've got this word 'his'tory, but what about her story? So that, in the end, the history of the world would be a history of every single one of its members, but of course, you could never get to grips with that.

Peter Greenaway

History You Would

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

War Good Writer

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

Peter Greenaway

Age Who Useful

It's a big criticism of Greenaway films that they are far too interested in formalism and not enough interested in notions of emotional content. It's a criticism I can fully understand from a public that has been brought up by Hollywood movies that demand intense emotional rapport.

Peter Greenaway

Movies Wood Woo

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

Great God You

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

Death Wit Who

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

Peter Greenaway

You Writer Write

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

Art Worries Wonderful

Cinema ceases to be passive and becomes active: you, the audience, are now, in some senses, in charge of the filmmaking process. You have all got mobile phones, you have all got cam recorders, and you've all got laptops, so you're all filmmakers.

Peter Greenaway

You Tops Top

All religions have always hated females.

Peter Greenaway

Religion Ways Way

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

Work Time Space

If you knew when you were going to die, wouldn't you make your life more worthwhile?

Peter Greenaway

Life Your You

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

Peter Greenaway

Work Education Tin

I think there is no future whatsoever in 3D. It does nothing to the grammar and syntax or vocabulary of cinema. And you get fed up with it in exactly 3 minutes.

Peter Greenaway

Future You Wit

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

Why Ways Way

Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward.

Peter Greenaway

War T Son

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

War Respect Dreams

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

Peter Greenaway

Writes Write Who

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

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

I obviously irritate people. I obviously antagonise them.

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

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

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 believe that cinema died on the 31 September 1983 when the zapper, or the remote control, was introduced into the living rooms of the world.

Peter Greenaway

We have more than enough deodorised, over-the-top, sentimental cinema. Let's try to bring a little human intelligence into things. It can be very rewarding.

Peter Greenaway

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

Peter Greenaway

All really worthwhile artists, creators, use the technology of their time, and anybody who doesn't becomes immediately a fossil.

Peter Greenaway

I want to be a prime creator - as every self-regarding artist should do.

Peter Greenaway

I'm a Darwinian.

Peter Greenaway

If you think about it, most cinema is built along 19th-century models. You would hardly think that the cinema had discovered James Joyce sometimes.

Peter Greenaway

My biggest critical success was 'The Draughtsman's Contract,' but then it wasn't the English who particularly thought so; it was the French, who are much more interested in Cartesian logic: in finding your way through more cerebral puzzle-making, if you wish.

Peter Greenaway

Some people would say again that my attitudes are cold and cerebral; I suppose if you're thinking about American sentimental movies, I suppose they would be.

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

We have to change the educational curricula and put a lot more emphasis on how important seeing and looking is.

Peter Greenaway

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

Peter Greenaway

I'm sorry - you know, culture is elitist. Culture has to be elitist: it's about seeing and knowing and about knowledge.

Peter Greenaway

Try this experiment: Pick a famous movie - 'Casablanca,' say - and summarize the plot in one sentence. Is that plot you just described the thing you remember most about it? Doubtful. Narrative is a necessary cement, but it disappears from memory.

Peter Greenaway

Cinema, which demands suspension of disbelief, is an increasingly naive proposition.

Peter Greenaway

Thanks to secondary education and the Internet, we're all knowledgeable now - if knowledge means the accumulation of facts. Curators are those who know how to maneuver around that knowledge.

Peter Greenaway

It's very difficult to understand, but I'm looking for a nonnarrative, multiscreen, present-tense cinema. Narrative is an artifact created by us. It does not exist at all in nature; it is a construct made by us, and I wonder whether we need the narrative anymore.

Peter Greenaway