Top 100 Banville Quotes
#1. Irish novelist John Banville has a creepy, introverted imagination.
Floyd Skloot
#2. 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
#3. If they give me the bloody prize, why can't they say nice things about me?
John Banville
#4. 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
#5. Inhabiting a place that could not be home, they were like actors compelled to play themselves.
John Banville
#6. It is a true pleasure to live in a century in which such great events take place, provided that one can take shelter in some little corner and watch the play in comfort. (attributed to N. Poussin)
John Banville
#7. Enormous morning, ponderous, meticulous; gray light streaking each bare branch, each single twig, along one side, making another tree, of glassy veins.
John Banville
#8. In this new life I am condemned to, is there nothing that is not open to doubt?
John Banville
#9. Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.
John Banville
#10. 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
#11. Call me Autolycus. Well, no, don't. Although I am, like that unfunny clown, a picker-up of unconsidered trifles. Which is a fancy way of saying I steal things
John Banville
#12. In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
John Banville
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. I shall be delivered, like a noble closing speech. I shall be, in a word, said.
John Banville
#17. When I say I don't like my own work, that doesn't mean it isn't better than everyone else's.
John Banville
#19. 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
#20. The dead are my dark matter, filling up impalpably the empty spaces of the world.
John Banville
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. Yes, another April; in a way, in this story, it is always April.
John Banville
#24. How I envy writers who can work on aeroplanes or in hotel rooms. On the run I can produce an article or a book review, or even a film script, but for fiction I must have my own desk, my own wall with my own postcards pinned to it, and my own window not to look out of.
John Banville
#25. I don't make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people.
John Banville
#26. This, I told myself, this is the way I shall be condemned to pass my days, turning over words, stray lines, fragments of memory, to see what might be lurking underneath them, as if they were so many flat stones, while I steadily faded.
John Banville
#27. No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
John Banville
#28. What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it.
John Banville
#29. Chaos is nothing but an infinite number of ordered things.
John Banville
#30. 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
#31. , her mouth working mutely like the valve of an undersea creature
John Banville
#32. Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works.
John Banville
#33. The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
John Banville
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. When you're writing there's a deep, deep level of concentration way below your normal self. This strange voice, these strange sentences come out of you.
John Banville
#37. With crime fiction, you have to write a half-dozen before they catch on.
John Banville
#38. Lots of water under that bridge, let's not drown ourselves in it.
John Banville
#39. Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.
John Banville
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Remember what April was like when we were young, that sense of liquid rushing and the wind taking blue scoops out of the air and the birds beside themselves in the budding trees?
John Banville
#43. I am not all sneers and scathings, you see, I have my gentler side.
John Banville
#44. 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
#46. You can't write about fantasy without being ridiculous.
John Banville
#47. The novel is a kind of elephant. But I like to make that elephant dance on a quarter.
John Banville
#48. Oh, by the way, the plot: it almost slipped my mind. Charlie French bought my mother's pictures cheap and sold them dear to Binkie Behrens, then bought them cheap from Binkie and sold them on to Max Molyneaux. Something like that. Does it matter? Dark deeds, dark deeds. Enough.
John Banville
#49. 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
#50. Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
John Banville
#51. The true workers all die in a fidget of frustration. So much to do, and so much left undone.
John Banville
#52. 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
#53. A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.
John Banville
#54. 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
#55. Everything in the room seemed turned away from me in sullen resistance, averthing itself from my unwelcome return.
John Banville
#56. 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
#57. The first thought that occurred to me, that night when I heard the chairman of the jury announce my name, was, Just think how many people hate me at this moment. Naturally, I wanted to annoy those people even further by being arrogant.
John Banville
#58. 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
#59. I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
John Banville
#61. The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
John Banville
#62. All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.
John Banville
#63. We're constantly losing - we're losing time, we're losing ourselves. I don't feel for the things I lost.
John Banville
#64. ... 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
#65. Writers are just like other people, except slightly more obsessed.
John Banville
#66. Poetry is that magic which consists in awakening sensations with the help of a combination of sounds ... that sorcery by which ideas are necessarily communicated to us, in a definite way, by words which nevertheless do not express them.
John Banville
#68. Halfway up the drive there was
God these tedious details.
Halfway up there was a ...
John Banville
#70. 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
#71. The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.
John Banville
#72. I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
John Banville
#73. 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
#74. When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it's finished. A certain point comes at which you can't do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence.
John Banville
#77. It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.
John Banville
#78. 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
#79. I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.
John Banville
#80. Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
John Banville
#81. The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.
John Banville
#82. We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
John Banville
#83. The past, I mean the real past, matters less than we pretend.
John Banville
#84. He made the mistake of imagining that his possessions were a measure of his own worth, and strutted and crowed, parading his things like a schoolboy with a champion catapult.
John Banville
#85. Do other people, remembering their parents, feel, as I do, a sense of having inadvertently done a small though significant, irreversible wrong?
John Banville
#86. How deceptively light they are, the truly decisive steps we take in life.
John Banville
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.
John Banville
#90. 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
#91. I like ideas. I find them more exciting than human behavior for the most part.
John Banville
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. But why at least? What a business it is, the human discourse. I
John Banville
#95. How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.
John Banville
#96. 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
#97. Time and age have brought not wisdom, as they are supposed to do, but confusion, and a broadening incomprehension, each year laying down another ring of nesience.
John Banville
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. Abruptly then it began to rain, I heard the swish of it behind me and turned in time to see it coming fast along the lane like a blown curtain, then it was against my face, a vehement chill glassy drenching.
John Banville
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