Quotes from Derek Jarman

The Last Of England works with image and sound, a language which is nearer to poetry than prose. It tells its story quite happily in silent images, in contrast to a word-bound cinema.

Pain can be alleviated by morphine but the pain of social ostracism cannot be taken away.

Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea. Understand that your morality is not law. Understand that we are you. Understand that if we decide to have sex whether safe, safer, or unsafe, it is our decision and you have no rights in our lovemaking.

Oh how Shakespeare would have loved cinema!

Always becoming, never arriving. Life is at a standstill - only ideas flash past. In such confusion I find myself running after them: Hey! Stop! Stop! But they escape, leaving me staring at a grey English spring.

You say to the boy open your eyes When he opens his eyes and sees the light You make him cry out. Saying O Blue come forth O Blue arise O Blue ascend O Blue come in

If you can, trap me. I'll make a good patient because I was brought up in the environment of authority; it's going to be hard to pull me in though- I've been running all my life, playing truant. If you can capture me I'll buckle down. I'll loathe you in secret and put on a good face.

I think of the area of magic as a metaphor for the homosexual situation. You know, magic which is banned and dangerous, difficult and mysterious. I can see that use of magic in the Cocteau films, in Kenneth Anger and very much in Eisenstein. Maybe it is an uncomfortable, banned area which is disruptive, and maybe it is a metaphor for the gay situation.

How to survive as a reasonably intact human being undamaged by popular preconceptions and misconceptions? It has been a long uphill battle.

How did my friends cross the cobalt river, with what did they pay the ferryman? As they set out for the indigo shore under this jet-black sky - some died on their feet with a backward glance.

a dream world, a world of magic and ritual, yet there are images there of the burning cars and radar systems, which remind you there is a price to be paid in order to gain this dream in the face of a world of violence.

The Gautama Buddha instructs me to walk away from illness. But he wasn't attached to a drip.

I am wandering aimlessly in this labyrinth of memories.

As I sweat it out in the early hours, a 'guilty victim' of the scourge, I want to bear witness to how happy I am, and will be till the day I die, that I was part of the hated sexual revolution; and that I don't regret a single step or encounter I made in that time; and if I write in future with regret, it will be a reflection of a temporary indisposition.

God is a black Jewish lesbian.

But now I have re-discovered boredom, where I can fight 'what next' with nothing.

Lawns, it seems to me, are against nature, barren and often threadbare - the enemy of a good garden. For the same trouble as mowing, you could have a year's vegetables: runner beans, cauliflowers and cabbages, mixed with pinks and peonies, shirley poppies and delphiniums; wouldn't that beautify the land and save us from the garden terrorism that prevails?

I'm not afraid of death but I am afraid of dying.

Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea. Understand that your morality is not law. Understand that we are you. Understand that if we decide to have sex whether safe, safer, or unsafe, it is our decision and you have no rights in our lovemaking.

The preserve of ambition and folly in pursuit of illusion, or delusion.

These names: gay, queer, homosexual are limiting. I would love to finish with them. We're going to have to decide which terms to use and where we use them. For me to use the word 'queer' is a liberation; it was a word that frightened me, but no longer.

I wouldn't wish the eighties on anyone, it was the time when all that was rotten bubbled to the surface. If you were not at the receiving end of this mayhem you could be unaware of it.

All men are homosexual, some turn straight. It must be very odd to be a straight man because your sexuality is hopelessly defensive. It's like an ideal of racial purity.

I'm not afraid of death but I am afraid of dying. Pain can be alleviated by morphine but the pain of social ostracism cannot be taken away.