Peter Greenaway: Booking

“Where is a book before it is born? Does a book grow like a tree? Who are a book's parents? Does a book need two parents -- a mother and a father? Can a book be born inside another book? And where is the parent book of books?”

Peter Greenaway

From the seventh book, "The Book of Youth"
The Pillow Book

Books , Parent , Tree

“Book #10: A Book of Travellers' Tales. As it hits the water its pages detach themselves from the covers, which sink… and the pages form themselves into small paper boats that float away on the tide.”

Peter Greenaway

Prospero's Books

Books , Travel , Water

“This book is gaudy like a gilded cauliflower which smells so bad after a good hot water soaking, like hot chocolate sweetened with sugar beet / incompatibles blended incongruously to no purpose.”

Peter Greenaway

From the fifth book, "The Book of the Exhibitionist"
The Pillow Book

Books , Water

“If you were not to be its victim, this book and body would amuse you with its arrogance. It would make you laugh. Because you were not its victim, you could feel no pain of betrayal.”

Peter Greenaway

From the eighth book, "The Book of the Seducer"
The Pillow Book

Pain , Books , Feeling , Betrayal

“Death is not necessarily an old and withered book with dry pages. It can be a thousand leaves of strong and shining text on a powerful body, held erect on the vertebrae of a strong spine. The heart hardly breathes because quietus has been reached, the torso is like a rock, the legs are rooted, the ink is dependable. If the words of death should be considered faded and sere -- where could be the dignity in dying?”

Peter Greenaway

From the thirteenth book, "The Book of the Dead"
The Pillow Book

Death , Books , Strong , Heart

“This book is past the first flush of youth. It is a book that is in puberty. It is hesitating, and from the vantage point of the mature reader, it is both a sad and amusing reminder of the part which is not always attractive enough to be revisited.”

Peter Greenaway

From the seventh book, "The Book of Youth"
The Pillow Book

Books , Youth , Sadness , Past

“In one of the rooms of the Fortuny Palace there are eight books from Prospero's Library. They are magical books. In many senses all books are magical.”

Peter Greenaway

Watching Water

Books , Sense

“May I keep this book forever. May this book and this body outlast my love. May this book and this body love me as I love its length, its breadth, its thickness, its text, its skin, its letters, its punctuation, its quiet and its noisy pages.”

Peter Greenaway

From the sixth book, "The Book of the Lover"
The Pillow Book

Love , Books

“One of my heroes, almost necessarily from what I'm saying, of course, is Borges, who is a supreme master of doing thing -- being a data bank -- and the beauty of this economy is that he could have written War and Peace in three or four pages; who knows, it might have been a better book.”

Peter Greenaway

From an interview in Art and Design, no. 49
Interviews

War , Books , Peace , Beauty

“Atlas, the man who carries the world, becomes the book of the maps of the world. An example of man, or God, into book. Few have that honour.”

Peter Greenaway

Flying Out of This World

God , Books , World

“I want to describe the Body as a Book, a Book as a Body, and this Body and this Book will be the first Volume of Thirteen Volumes.”

Peter Greenaway

From the first book, "The Agenda"
The Pillow Book

Books

“This book and I have become indivisible. I have placed my feet on this book's last pages, confident of standing so much higher in the world than I ever stood before.”

Peter Greenaway

From the sixth book, "The Book of the Lover"
The Pillow Book

Books , World , Confidence

“This book has neither the virtue of irony nor deserves the sympathy reserved for the truly mad.”

Peter Greenaway

From the third book, "The Book of the Idiot"
The Pillow Book

Books , Madness

“Gonzalo threw many books into the bottom of the leaky vessel that took Prospero out on to the sea away from Italy and Europe into exile. Shakespeare does not, of course, elaborate what these volumes were. Prospero's Books speculates. There would need perhaps to be books on navigation and survival, there would need to be books for an elderly scholar to learn how to rear and educate a young daughter, how to colonise an island, farm it, subjugate its inhabitants, identify its plants and husband its wild beasts. There would need to be books to offer solace and advise patience and put past glory and present despondency into perspective. There would need to be books to encourage revenge.”

Peter Greenaway

Prospero's Books

Books , Education , Revenge , Learning

“Prospero's power is held in his relationship to his books, and The Tempest is witness to more than a few apparently conflicting facets of his personality -- not all of them particularly praiseworthy. What was it, in those books, that made Prospero not only powerful but also a moralising schold and a petty revenger, a benevolent despote, a jealous father and also a master designer of song and dance? Are we truly the product of what we read?”

Peter Greenaway

Prospero's Books

Books , Revenge , Reading , Dance

“Book #8: The Vesalius Anatomy of Birth. As it hits the water, it screams and spurts blood like a pierced heart -- as it sinks, there is a suggestion of entrails.”

Peter Greenaway

Prospero's Books

Books , Birth , Water , Heart

“On the same day as I started to keep my own pillow-book -- I met my future husband for the first time. I was six, he was ten. We did not exchange a word. He had been hand-picked by my father's publisher.”

Peter Greenaway

Nagiko's journal for Sep 16 1993
The Pillow Book

Books , Time , Future

“The major sweep of this book's living is too often marred by qualifying. It is hedged about with ifs and buts and if onlys and howevers, excuses for a life that is about to shut its covers for the last time and then crumple into dust in an unseen and never-to-be-remembered library.”

Peter Greenaway

From the fourth book, "The Book of Impotence"
The Pillow Book

Life , Books , Time

“Go on. Treat me like the page of a book. Your book.”

Peter Greenaway

Jerome, to Nagiko
The Pillow Book

Books

“Is this a book exhausted from too much reading? Or too little reading?”

Peter Greenaway

From the fourth book, "The Book of Impotence"
The Pillow Book

Books , Reading