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

Peter Greenaway

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" 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

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

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" 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. "

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" 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?' "

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" 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. "

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" Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward. "

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

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

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

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" I've always been fascinated by Eisenstein. "

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

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" I obviously irritate people. I obviously antagonise them. "

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" I'm a Darwinian. "

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" 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. "

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

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" 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. "

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

Peter Greenaway

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

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

Peter Greenaway

" 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

" 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

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

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" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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