Peter Greenaway Quotes

A picture is worth a thousand words.

One picture is worth a thousand words.

“One picture is worth a thousand words,” said an ancient Chinese; but it may take ten thousand words to validate it.

Images have a unique power to impart that which is beyond words.

Image is an international language.

I did television for a very long time, but if you're on television, words don't count. What the eye sees beats the words. If you switch sides, from radio to television, you learn that the wordiness that you learn on the radio is useless or not nearly as powerful, and you have to learn to trust that the eye will just beat the ear.

I find movies rely upon dialogue too much sometimes, and you lose the power of what really the most basic cinematic language is, which is the visual language.

If I really believe that visual representation and narrative are ways to convey important, complex ideas, and if the world is gravitating toward this form, then geez, I better do it myself. I want to do it myself.

The movies that influenced me were movies that told their stories through pictures more than words.

It's too bad for us 'literary' enthusiasts, but it's the truth nevertheless - pictures tell any story more effectively than words.

I think of images as an immune system and a transit system.

I feel like I can communicate much better using images than words.

It's a visual world and people respond to visuals.

When I work on a book, I usually start with a question. And I don't sit around and go 'I need to write a book. What's a good question?' It will be a question that's just clanging around in my head. So for 'What It Is,' it was this idea of 'What is an image?'

But I think we're also just talking about the literacy of the audience. The visual literacy of the audience. They've seen so many images now, especially here in the States. There's so much to look at, to watch. So the visual storytelling literacy is harder to impress.

That night image had replaced the written word as the natural language of politics.

We do not need a text-based cinema... we need an image-based cinema.

I'm huge on visuals. I love visuals.

For me, I'm not a great wordsmith, and so maybe from lack of great dialogue writing, I thought it's easier and better to express a story through visuals.

People can express themselves better with images than just text, so they communicate more this way.

A close-up on screen can say all a song can.

I trust the pictures to tell what I want to say.

A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.

So I like to try to go back and develop pure visual storytelling. Because to me, it's one of the most exciting aspects of making movies and almost a lost art at this point.

The photographic image... is a message without a code.