Banville Quotes: top 96 famous quotes about Banville

Banville Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Banville quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

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. — John Banville

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

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

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

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

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. — John Banville

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — John Banville

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

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

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. — John Banville

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. — John Banville

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? — John Banville

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

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

No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal. — John Banville

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

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

Life is tragic but it's equally comic. — John Banville

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

The past beats inside me like a second heart. — John Banville

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

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

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

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

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

I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written. — John Banville

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

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

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

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

... 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. — John Banville

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

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

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. — John Banville

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

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

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

Chaos is nothing but an infinite number of ordered things. — John Banville

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

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

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

I am the worst judge of my books. — John Banville

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. — John Banville

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

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

Irish novelist John Banville has a creepy, introverted imagination. — Floyd Skloot

Whom now would I love, and who would love me? — John Banville

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

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

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

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. — John Banville

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. — John Banville

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists. — John Banville

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

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

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. — John Banville

The secret of survival is a defective imagination. — John Banville

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think I am becoming my own ghost. — John Banville

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. — John Banville

The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization. — John Banville

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

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

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

I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic. — John Banville

You can't write about fantasy without being ridiculous. — John Banville