Peter Greenaway Quotes

A strange thing has happened - while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.

Changes in our aesthetic tastes have no value or meaning in and of themselves; what has value and meaning is the idea of change itself. Or, better stated: not change in and of itself, but change as an agent or inspiration of modern creations.

Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art.

The whole world is pretending the breakthrough is in technology. The bottleneck is really in art.

I think, as an artist, it's very important to continue to be challenged and feel challenged all the time.

There is nothing new in art except talent.

The creation continues incessantly through the media of man.

The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal; the good one really does.

I'm forever learning and that's why I'm always able to create new styles and new dimensions of hip-hop.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea. A good artist does not need anything.

No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; it is just that others are behind the times.

New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements... the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.

If we are to preserve culture we must continue to create it.

My friend Harry Nilsson used to say the definition of an artist was someone who rode way ahead of the herd and was sort of the lookout. Now you don't have to be that, to be an artist. You can be right smack-dab in the middle of the herd. If you are, you'll be the richest.

There hasn't been any art yet. Art is just beginning.

It's a different era. Our job now is to show leadership and vision and to help the next generation of artists.

Well, I am not interested in the kind of expression that you have when you paint a painting with brush strokes. It's all right, but it's already done and I want to do something new.

I feel like every artist has an opportunity to create something new and to challenge themselves to reach out to a new crowd.

Although I consider myself a direct descendant of the Renaissance heritage, I believe that an artist has to follow his own evolution and not solely be a ruminant of the past, as glorious as it may have been. An artist conducts a search that may lead him far out in exploring new areas of interest. I continually search to discover new and better means of expression.

If you want to be an artist in the long run, it isn't necessarily a good axiom to repeat formulas over and over until they're used up.

I've learned that you can do something great, but you have to continue reinventing yourself as an artist. So by the time someone else is copying your style, you have something else to offer your audience.

As an artist, you find at different times you want to do different things.

I start with the aim of making something instrumental, and then I'm just like, 'Agh, no, it's not interesting enough. I've got to say something here.'

In my opinion, the most dangerous thing an artist can do in this day and age is not embrace the present.