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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.

Peter Greenaway

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Peter Greenaway
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: April 5
Actor
Cinematographer
Experimental Artist
Film Director
Film Editor
Painter
Screenwriter
Television Director
Theatrical Director
Writer
Newport
South Wales
Sex
Subjects
Ability
Manipulate
Culture
Nowadays
Death
Basically
Two
Matters
Matter
Western
Never
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Cinema is dead, long live cinema.
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I got in trouble with the stern-faced Russians who didn't want me to create a guy who is mortal.
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We are all united by the phenomenon that we have a body and that body is universally the same, more or less. If we lose sight of that perspective, everything can desperately suffer.
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Investigation is never complete.
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The game Flights of Fancy or Reverse Strip Jump is played from as high a jumping-point as a competitor will dare. After each successful jump, the competitor is allowing to put on an article of clothing. Thirteen jumps is normally more than enough to see a competitor fully dressed for the day.
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If every man is supposed to think of sex once every nine minutes, what on earth does he think of in the other eight?
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If you're a Shakespeare fan, isn't that a way to negotiate sex and death?
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All the material is fictional and develops its own eight and a half private, coelesced journeys, where, perhaps not unexpectedly, the females can run faster than the men and trade their freedoms by exhausting the male sexual fantasies and replacing them by some of their own.
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Cinema has reached a dead end.
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One of my heroes, almost necessarily from what I'm saying, of course, is Borges, who is a supreme master of doing thing -- being a data bank -- and the beauty of this economy is that he could have written War and Peace in three or four pages who knows, it might have been a better book.
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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.
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The best painting is totally non-narrative. It doesn't have to tell you a story.
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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.
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A really intelligent man makes an indifferent painter. For painting requires a certain blindness, a partial refusal to be aware of all the options.
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I went to art school, and every Tuesday and Friday we drew the nude. If you look at Western painting, male and female nudes are in the center of every painting. It's difficult and exciting to draw the nude. Why get so upset about this? It's our duty to break taboos.
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You should be allowed to rub out and start again, it means that you are human. The purists are tedious, they tell you a mistake is like an enduring black mark. Nonsense -- better to be human than some infernal machine never going wrong.
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If Good approved of his creature's creation, He breathed the painted clay-model into life by signing His name.
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My personal obsessions are much more interesting to me than other people's.
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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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Eisenstein was a good editor. I was trained as a film editor, and I've no doubt that the editor is key to a film.
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