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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
Ability
Manipulate
Culture
Nowadays
Death
Basically
Two
Matters
Matter
Western
Never
Subject
Sex
Subjects

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This is where I begin to do the writing. I am now going to be the pen and not the paper.
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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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It seems so tragic to me that so many filmmakers are making movies up against this extra-ordinary revolution with one eye closed and two hands tied behind their backs.
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Itch to read, scratch to understand.
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Imagine a world where nothing is stable. In the West, we have three moving elements -- Air, Fire, Water -- but at least we can depend on the fourth.
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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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Human relationships are patterned and cross-patterned and restricted and limited and delimited and caged and freed again by the elaborate conventions, rules and games which we call civilisation. They're often absurd and farcical, and sometimes they're tragic, yet we acknowledge that they are necessary.
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English culture is highly literary-based.
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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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Bill Viola is worth ten Scorseses.
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I share this interest in the weird, strange, unusual, surreal.
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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 have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself.
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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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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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A hand cannot write on itself.
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I still would like you to feel the enthusiasm that all those people felt in the twenties and thirties, that indeed we had discovered, with cinema, the great 20th-century, all-embracing medium.
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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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