Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by John Banville, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring John Banville quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 155 John Banville quotes for you to read and share.
Perhaps it was the flabby stink of seared flesh that was making me feel peculiar; that, and the smoke from the candles on the tables and the borborygmic blarings of the three-piece band. -- John Banville
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
Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics. -- John Banville
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
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
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
It seems to me a work of art is the evidence offered by a fantastically observant witness -- 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
Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works. -- John Banville
Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand. -- John Banville
He liked to bewilder his pupils, it was a form of tyranny. -- John Banville
There are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I know seems to have fallen out of my mind like a shower of rain, and I am gripped for a moment in paralysed dismay, waiting for it all to come back but with no certainty that it will. -- 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 been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist - I'd put novelist last. -- 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
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
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
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
The telephone ringing gave me a dreadful start. I have never got used to this machine, the way it crouches so malevolently, ready to start clamouring for attention when you least expect it, like a mad baby. -- John Banville
The novel is resilient, and so are novelists. -- John Banville
If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence. -- John Banville
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
I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get. -- John Banville
I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic. -- John Banville
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
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
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
I am not all sneers and scathings, you see, I have my gentler side. -- 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
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
A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him. -- 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
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
At thee seaside all is narrow horizontals, the world reduced to a few long straight lines pressed between earth and sky. -- John Banville
Enormous morning, ponderous, meticulous; gray light streaking each bare branch, each single twig, along one side, making another tree, of glassy veins. -- John Banville
The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be. -- 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
The sentence is the great invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. I couldn't ask for anything better. It's as near to godliness as I can get. -- 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
Halfway up the drive there was
God these tedious details.
Halfway up there was a ... -- 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
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
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
I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure. -- John Banville
We writers are shy, nocturnal creatures. Push us into the light and the light blinds us. -- 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
Of her blood. Oh, I do not say these are -- John Banville
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
To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there. -- John Banville
Inhabiting a place that could not be home, they were like actors compelled to play themselves. -- John Banville
If they give me the bloody prize, why can't they say nice things about me? -- John Banville
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
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
I shall strip away layer after layer of grime
the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling
until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self. -- John Banville
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
The past, I mean the real past, matters less than we pretend. -- John Banville
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
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
I always think that if you know somebody's name then there's something slightly fraudulent about that person. Otherwise we wouldn't have heard of him or her. -- John Banville
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
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
Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it. -- John Banville
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
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
What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it. -- John Banville
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
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
Do other people, remembering their parents, feel, as I do, a sense of having inadvertently done a small though significant, irreversible wrong? -- John Banville
You can't write about fantasy without being ridiculous. -- John Banville
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
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
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
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
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
In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there. -- 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
The past beats inside me like a second heart. -- John Banville
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
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
Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead. -- John Banville
The dead are my dark matter, filling up impalpably the empty spaces of the world. -- John Banville
But why at least? What a business it is, the human discourse. I -- John Banville
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
The true workers all die in a fidget of frustration. So much to do, and so much left undone. -- John Banville
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
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
It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature. -- John Banville
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
The novel is a kind of elephant. But I like to make that elephant dance on a quarter. -- John Banville
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
No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal. -- John Banville
Yes, another April; in a way, in this story, it is always April. -- John Banville
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
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
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
Whom now would I love, and who would love me? -- John Banville
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
Writers are just like other people, except slightly more obsessed. -- John Banville
When fans of mine meet me, I can see the disappointment in their eyes. Every artist knows of this phenomenon. -- John Banville
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
I don't make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people. -- 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
I know some of my memories are made up and they are far more powerful than the things that actually happened. For example, I always remember my brother posting me a copy of 'Dubliners' from Africa, but he says he never did. -- John Banville
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
I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written. -- John Banville
This is the only way another creature can be known: on the surface, that's where there is depth. -- John Banville
That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business. -- 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
With crime fiction, you have to write a half-dozen before they catch on. -- John Banville
The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization. -- John Banville
We did our best, Anna and I. We forgave each other for all we were not. -- John Banville
, her mouth working mutely like the valve of an undersea creature -- John Banville
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
I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them. -- John Banville
I too could go, oh, yes, at a moment's notice I could go and be as though I had not been, except that the long habit of living indisposeth me for dying, -- John Banville
I live in Dublin, God knows why. There are greatly more congenial places I could have settled in - Italy, France, Manhattan - but I like the climate here, and Irish light seems to be essential for me and for my writing. -- John Banville
I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant. -- John Banville
Lots of water under that bridge, let's not drown ourselves in it. -- John Banville
I like ideas. I find them more exciting than human behavior for the most part. -- John Banville
Being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left -- John Banville
We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past. -- 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
I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects. -- John Banville
I think I am becoming my own ghost. -- John Banville
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
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
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
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
All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained. -- John Banville
Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him. -- John Banville
I am the worst judge of my books. -- John Banville
Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off. -- 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
Everything in the room seemed turned away from me in sullen resistance, averthing itself from my unwelcome return. -- John Banville
Life is tragic but it's equally comic. -- 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
Her mouth tasted of smoke and toothpaste and something feety that made my blood flare -- John Banville
I shall be delivered, like a noble closing speech. I shall be, in a word, said. -- 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
I was always a distinct no-one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone. -- 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
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
The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language. -- John Banville
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
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
He had scores to settle with the world, and she, at that moment, was world enough for him. -- John Banville
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
In this new life I am condemned to, is there nothing that is not open to doubt? -- John Banville
And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference. -- 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
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
Chaos is nothing but an infinite number of ordered things. -- John Banville
How deceptively light they are, the truly decisive steps we take in life. -- John Banville
The secret of survival is a defective imagination. -- John Banville
The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave. -- John Banville
