Top 100 John Banville Quotes
#1. A married couple never seem so married as when viewed from the back seat of a motor car, talking quietly together in the front. Polly and Marcus might have been in their bedroom already, so soft and intimate their converse sounded to me, as I sat there alertly mute behind the backs of their heads
John Banville
#2. If they give me the bloody prize, why can't they say nice things about me?
John Banville
#3. 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
#4. Inhabiting a place that could not be home, they were like actors compelled to play themselves.
John Banville
#5. The effect of prizes on one's career - if that is what to call it - is considerable, since they give one more clout with publishers and more notoriety among journalists. The effect on one's writing, however, is nil - otherwise, one would be in deep trouble.
John Banville
#6. In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
John Banville
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. I shall be delivered, like a noble closing speech. I shall be, in a word, said.
John Banville
#11. When I say I don't like my own work, that doesn't mean it isn't better than everyone else's.
John Banville
#13. The dead are my dark matter, filling up impalpably the empty spaces of the world.
John Banville
#14. 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
#15. I don't make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people.
John Banville
#16. No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
John Banville
#17. What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it.
John Banville
#18. I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking off desperately toward the horizon as if in mute search for a sign of rescue.
John Banville
#19. Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works.
John Banville
#20. How is it that in childhood everything new that caught my interest had an aura of the uncanny, since according to all the authorities the uncanny is not some new thing but a thing known returning in a different form, become a revenant?
John Banville
#21. I guard my memories of my lost one jealously, keep them securely under wraps, like a folio of delicate watercolours that must be protected from the harsh light of day.
John Banville
#22. With crime fiction, you have to write a half-dozen before they catch on.
John Banville
#23. Lots of water under that bridge, let's not drown ourselves in it.
John Banville
#24. Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.
John Banville
#25. We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.
John Banville
#26. I am not all sneers and scathings, you see, I have my gentler side.
John Banville
#27. I had a sudden image of myself as a sort of large dark simian something slumped there at the table, or not a something but a nothing, rather, a hole in the room, a palpable absence, a darkness visible.
John Banville
#29. You can't write about fantasy without being ridiculous.
John Banville
#30. The novel is a kind of elephant. But I like to make that elephant dance on a quarter.
John Banville
#31. Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
John Banville
#32. The true workers all die in a fidget of frustration. So much to do, and so much left undone.
John Banville
#33. All I wanted was to be left alone. They abhor a vacuum, other people. You find a quiet corner where you can hunker down in peace, and the next minute there they are, crowding around you in their party hats, tooting their paper whistles in your face and insisting you get up and join in the knees-up.
John Banville
#34. A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.
John Banville
#35. 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
#36. When young writers approach me for advice, I remind them, as gently as I can, that they are on their own, with no help available anywhere. Which is how it should be.
John Banville
#37. What is my purpose here? I may say, I just sat down to write, but I am not deceived. I have never done anything in my life that did not have a purpose, usually hidden, sometimes even from myself.
John Banville
#38. I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
John Banville
#40. The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
John Banville
#41. We're constantly losing - we're losing time, we're losing ourselves. I don't feel for the things I lost.
John Banville
#43. Halfway up the drive there was
God these tedious details.
Halfway up there was a ...
John Banville
#45. 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
#46. The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.
John Banville
#47. I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
John Banville
#48. My work is frequently described as cold, which is baffling, since it seems to me embarrassingly, shame-makingly, scandalously warm. I find my work filled with sentiment, and I can't imagine why people find it cold.
John Banville
#51. I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.
John Banville
#52. Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
John Banville
#53. The past, I mean the real past, matters less than we pretend.
John Banville
#54. Her own mother had died when Anna was twelve and since then father and daughter had faced the world like a pair of nineteenth-century adventurers, a riverboat gambler, say, and his alibi girl.
John Banville
#55. All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie. It was a way of living; lies are life's almost-anagram.
John Banville
#56. Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.
John Banville
#57. When I started writing, I was a great rationalist and believed I was absolutely in control. But the older one gets, the more confused, and for an artist I think that is quite a good thing: you allow in more of your instinctual self; your dreams, fantasies and memories. It's richer, in a way.
John Banville
#58. The big rippled sheets of glass were taken out of their sacking and lowered from the back of the wagon, and for a few giddy moments a troupe of rubbery dwarves and etiolated giants shimmied and shivered in those depthless caskets. of light.
John Banville
#59. Death is such a strange thing. One minute you're here and then just gone. You'd think there would be an anteroom, a place where you could be visited before you go.
John Banville
#60. But why at least? What a business it is, the human discourse. I
John Banville
#61. How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.
John Banville
#62. I sometimes think that I might be slightly autistic. There might be a syndrome that hasn't been named. I don't seem to see the world in the same way that most people I know see it. They don't seem to be baffled by it.
John Banville
#63. I'd given up Catholicism in my teens but something of it stays with me. I try to create the perfect sentence - that's as close to godliness as I can get.
John Banville
#64. There is something about gin, the tang in it of the deep wildwood, perhaps, that always makes me think of twilight and mists and dead maidens. Tonight it tinkled in my mouth like secret laughter.
John Banville
#65. 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
#66. Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self.
John Banville
#67. That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business.
John Banville
#68. We writers are shy, nocturnal creatures. Push us into the light and the light blinds us.
John Banville
#69. I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist.
John Banville
#70. Being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
John Banville
#71. I don't know if there is a personal identity. We all imagine that we are absolute individuals. But when we begin to look for where this individuality resides, it's very difficult to find.
John Banville
#72. We artists love to talk tough, but we're just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it.
John Banville
#73. It seems to me a work of art is the evidence offered by a fantastically observant witness
John Banville
#74. I want my art to make people look at the world in a new way. I mean, what's the point of the art of writing if it doesn't take you into the mysterious?
John Banville
#75. 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
#76. I don't see how English as we use it in Europe can be revivified. It's like Latin must have been in about A.D. 300, tired and used up. All one can do is press very hard stylistically to make it glow.
John Banville
#77. To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.
John Banville
#78. He had scores to settle with the world, and she, at that moment, was world enough for him.
John Banville
#79. In my world, there are no simple questions, and precious few answers of any kind. If you are going to write about me, you must resign yourself to that.
John Banville
#80. Office life is very, very strange. It's like no other way of living. You have an intimacy with people who you work with in the office, yet if you meet them on the streets, you both look the other way because you're embarrassed.
John Banville
#81. All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
John Banville
#82. 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
#83. The tea-bag is a vile invention suggestive to my perhaps overly squeamish eye of something a careless person might leave behind unflushed in the lavatory.
John Banville
#84. We did our best, Anna and I. We forgave each other for all we were not.
John Banville
#85. Yet even without saying, each knew what the other was thinking, and, more acutely, what the other was feeling
this is a further effect of our shared sorrow, this empathy, this mournful telepathy.
John Banville
#86. I would have made her a part of me. If I could, I would have had a notch cut in my already aging side and a slip of her, my young rose, inserted there and lashed to me with twine.
John Banville
#87. When fans of mine meet me, I can see the disappointment in their eyes. Every artist knows of this phenomenon.
John Banville
#88. Why does the past seem so magical, so fraught, so luminous? At the time it was just, ugh, another boring bloody day. But, to look back on, it's a day full of miracles and light and extraordinary events. Why is this? What process do we apply to the past, to give it this vividness? I don't know.
John Banville
#89. Lately I had been finding it hard to understand the simplest things people said to me, as if what they were speaking in were a form of language I did not recognise; I would know the words but could not assemble them into sense.
John Banville
#90. And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
John Banville
#91. What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.
John Banville
#92. At thee seaside all is narrow horizontals, the world reduced to a few long straight lines pressed between earth and sky.
John Banville
#93. I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
John Banville
#94. None of this means anything. Anything of significance, that is. I am just amusing myself, musing, losing myself in a welter of words. For words in here are a form of luxury, of sensuousness, they are all we have been allowed to keep of the rich, wasteful world from which we are shut away.
John Banville
#95. This is the only way another creature can be known: on the surface, that's where there is depth.
John Banville
#96. I was always a distinct no-one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone.
John Banville
#97. If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
John Banville
#98. 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
#99. Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.
John Banville
#100. These things that were between us, these and a myriad others, a myriad myriad, these remain of her, but what will become of them when I am gone, I who am their repository and sole preserver?
John Banville
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