226 Quotes by Peter Greenaway

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.

I believe there's no such thing as history; there's only historians, and in English, we've got this word 'his'tory, but what about her story? So that, in the end, the history of the world would be a history of every single one of its members, but of course, you could never get to grips with that.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.