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

Peter Greenaway

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

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" 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. "

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" Most people are visually illiterate. Most people don't understand images: they don't understand how to interpret them or how to manufacture them. "

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" 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

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

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

" 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

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

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" 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

" 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

" I've always been fascinated by Eisenstein. "

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

" 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

" English culture is highly literary-based. "

Peter Greenaway

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

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" 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

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

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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?' "

Peter Greenaway