Tulse Luper, who without too many confessions, in a sense, is a fictive version of me. I have to say he has far more exciting adventures, and certainly a lot of them sexual, than ever I've experienced. But in a sense, what you do with an alter ego, you give them all sorts of permissions and licences which you know you'll never be able to embrace in your real life.

Peter Greenaway

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

Peter Greenaway

arrogant film

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

Peter Greenaway

mediums rich cinema

I've always been fascinated by maps and cartography. A map tells you where you've been, where you are, and where you're going -- in a sense it's three tenses in one.

Peter Greenaway

cartography maps three

Americans don't understand what metaphor in cinema is about. They're extremely good at making straightforward, linear narrative movies, which entertain superbly. But they very rarely do anything else.

Peter Greenaway

metaphor narrative cinema

Creation, to me, is to try to orchestrate the universe to understand what surrounds us. Even if, to accomplish that, we use all sorts of strategems which in the end prove completely incapable of staving off chaos.

Peter Greenaway

chaos use trying

Works of art are never finished, just stopped.

Peter Greenaway

finished works-of-art art

My audience is comprised of three categories. The first category contains the people who decide after the first five minutes that they've made a mistake and leave. The second category is the people who give the film a chance and leave annoyed after 40 minutes. The third category includes the people that watch the whole film and return to see it again. If I'm able to persuade 33% of the audience to stay, then I can say that I've succeeded.

Peter Greenaway

mistake giving people

I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing.

Peter Greenaway

plot cinema ideas

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

Peter Greenaway

sincerely should believe

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.

Peter Greenaway

black mistake mean

I always think that art is one of the most wonderful exciting curious ways to learn. I have no worries or apologies about art being used as a teaching medium.

Peter Greenaway

apology teaching art

Every historian has a vested interest. "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" was not about the Roman but the British empire. What price the truth?

Peter Greenaway

empires decline fall

Most cinema is not about images but text. Why on earth have we based cinema on text? Why can't we break that umbilical cord? Why do we have to pollute cinema?

Peter Greenaway

umbilical-cord cinema earth

I want to regard my public as infinitely intelligent, as understanding notions of the suspension of disbelief and as realising all the time that this is not a slice of life, this is openly a film.

Peter Greenaway

intelligent understanding want

If every man is supposed to think of sex once every nine minutes, what on earth does he think of in the other eight?

Peter Greenaway

men sex thinking

Only cinema narrows its concern down to its content, that is to its story. It should, instead, concern itself with its form, its structure.

Peter Greenaway

structure cinema stories

The pretence that numbers are not the humble creation of man, but are the exacting language of the Universe and therefore possess the secret of all things, is comforting, terrifying and mesmeric.

Peter Greenaway

creation-of-man humble men

My favourite film-maker west of the English Channel is not English - but to me doesn't seem American either - David Lynch - a curious American-European film-maker. He has - against odds - achieved what we want to achieve here. He takes great risks with a strong personal voice and adequate funds and space to exercise it. I thought Blue Velvet was a masterpiece.

Peter Greenaway

odds strong exercise

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

Peter Greenaway

actors different

The best painting is totally non-narrative. It doesn't have to tell you a story.

Peter Greenaway

painting narrative stories