Painting Quotes by Peter Greenaway

American actors are coy. We all have pricks and cunts, or are you different from the rest of us?

— Peter Greenaway

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

— Peter Greenaway

To be an atheist you have to have ten thousand times more imagination than if you are a religious fundamentalist. You must take the…

— Peter Greenaway

An American critic wrote that she would rather be forced to read the New York telephone directory three times than watch the film A…

— Peter Greenaway

I like a lot of glasses about - it highers the tone.

— Peter Greenaway

There are those who think that Zeffirelli's Hamlet is the way to treat Shakespeare. I think that cinema can handle much more. We somehow…

— Peter Greenaway

A really intelligent man makes an indifferent painter. For painting requires a certain blindness, a partial refusal to be aware of all the options.

— Peter Greenaway

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

— 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

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…

— Peter Greenaway

There are basically only two subject matters in all Western culture: sex and death. We do have some ability to manipulate sex nowadays. We…

— Peter Greenaway

Cinema doesn't connect with the body as artists have in two thousand years of painting, using the nude as the central figure which the…

— Peter Greenaway

Cinema is far too rich and capable a medium to be merely left to the storytellers.

— Peter Greenaway

Jean Renoir once suggested that most true creators have only one idea and spend their lives reworking it, but then very rapidly he added…

— Peter Greenaway

Bill Viola is worth ten Scorseses.

— Peter Greenaway