Top 15 Peter Greenaway Quotes

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.

... [I] would certainly like to work with Dennehy again. When he was presented with the script he didn't know me from Adam, and why should he, small-time eccentric, esoteric Englishman that I am?

In an interview in Positif, Apr. 86

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.

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

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.

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

One [film] is based on the Medea myth about a woman who kills her own child -- The Love of Ruins. It is almost a technical exercise to see if I can convince an audience or make an audience sympathetic to a woman who kills her own child.

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.

Men are so shit scared of female activities, especially if they are clandestine.

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.

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.

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.

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

I suppose I have a concern for this extraordinary, beautiful, amazing, exciting, taxonomically brilliant world that we live in, but we keep fucking it up all the time.