John Banville quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by John Banville

John Banville Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from John Banville on Wise Famous Quotes.

Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.

And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.

The world is always ready to be amazed, but the self, that lynx-eyed monitor, sees all the subterfuges, all the cut corners, and is not deceived.

The past, I mean the real past, matters less than we pretend.

It seems to me a work of art is the evidence offered by a fantastically observant witness

If they give me the bloody prize, why can't they say nice things about me?

Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.

Everything we do is tinged with the knowledge that this may be the last time that we will do this, and that makes what we're doing incredibly sweet.

The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.

Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.

We're constantly losing - we're losing time, we're losing ourselves. I don't feel for the things I lost.

The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.

I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.

Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don't do well, in the hope of learning.

I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.

Yes, another April; in a way, in this story, it is always April.

I have this fantasy. I'm walking past a bookshop and I click my fingers and all my books go blank. So I can start again and get it right.

The steel kettle shone, a slow furl of steam at its spout, vaguely suggestive of genie and lamp. Oh, grant me a wish, just the one.

And anyway, who's to say that what we see when we're drunk is not reality, and the sober world a bleared phantasmagoria

The true workers all die in a fidget of frustration. So much to do, and so much left undone.

Dogs are dim creatures, do not speak to me of their good sense
have you ever heard of a team of tomcats hauling a sled across the frozen wastes?

No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.

Halfway up the drive there was
God these tedious details.
Halfway up there was a ...

A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.

Life is tragic but it's equally comic.

I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

, her mouth working mutely like the valve of an undersea creature

At thee seaside all is narrow horizontals, the world reduced to a few long straight lines pressed between earth and sky.

With the crime novels, it's delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. It's like having a fictitious family.

If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.

How deceptively light they are, the truly decisive steps we take in life.

I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.

Do other people, remembering their parents, feel, as I do, a sense of having inadvertently done a small though significant, irreversible wrong?

Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.

That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business.

Everything in the room seemed turned away from me in sullen resistance, averthing itself from my unwelcome return.

... a thief's heart is an impetuous organ, and while inwardly he throbs for absolution, at the same time he can't keep from bragging.

The novel is a kind of elephant. But I like to make that elephant dance on a quarter.

In this new life I am condemned to, is there nothing that is not open to doubt?

This is the way it is with me, always looking in or looking out, a chilly pane of glass between me and a remote and longed-for world.

With crime fiction, you have to write a half-dozen before they catch on.

How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.

We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.

Chaos is nothing but an infinite number of ordered things.

I like ideas. I find them more exciting than human behavior for the most part.

I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.

This is the only way another creature can be known: on the surface, that's where there is depth.

I am the worst judge of my books.

All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself.

Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.

The dead are my dark matter, filling up impalpably the empty spaces of the world.

The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.

Whom now would I love, and who would love me?

What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it.

I shall be delivered, like a noble closing speech. I shall be, in a word, said.

We artists love to talk tough, but we're just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it.

It was not a wave but a smooth rolling swell that seemed to come up from the deeps, as if something vast down there had stirred itself.

You know, artists don't really have all that much experience of life. We make a huge amount out of the small experience that we do have.

He had scores to settle with the world, and she, at that moment, was world enough for him.

All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.

You can't write about fantasy without being ridiculous.

I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.

In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.

In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.

I am not all sneers and scathings, you see, I have my gentler side.

It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.

Lots of water under that bridge, let's not drown ourselves in it.

We writers are shy, nocturnal creatures. Push us into the light and the light blinds us.

We did our best, Anna and I. We forgave each other for all we were not.

Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works.

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

I was always a distinct no-one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone.

But why at least? What a business it is, the human discourse. I

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.

The secret of survival is a defective imagination.

When I say I don't like my own work, that doesn't mean it isn't better than everyone else's.

But then, at what moment, of all our moments, is life not utterly, utterly changed, until the final, most momentous change of all? We

When fans of mine meet me, I can see the disappointment in their eyes. Every artist knows of this phenomenon.

Adam senses a large weariness in him, the weariness of an old actor in the middle of a long run in an old part.

Being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left

I don't make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people.

Writers are just like other people, except slightly more obsessed.

Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.

Her mouth tasted of smoke and toothpaste and something feety that made my blood flare

He liked to bewilder his pupils, it was a form of tyranny.

I think I am becoming my own ghost.

The trouble with you, Vic," he said, "is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.

The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.

Of her blood. Oh, I do not say these are

Inhabiting a place that could not be home, they were like actors compelled to play themselves.

I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.