Peter Greenaway

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

“I've always been fascinated by Eisenstein.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“For so many filmmakers, cinema is a means to an end.”

“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.”

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

“I really, sincerely believe that one should trust the work, and not the author.”

“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.”

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

“If you think about it, most cinema is built along 19th-century models. You would hardly think that the cinema had discovered James Joyce sometimes.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“We have to change the educational curricula and put a lot more emphasis on how important seeing and looking is.”