John Banville famous quotes

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

#Writing #Character #Exercise

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

#Heart #Past #Beats

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

#Writing #Self #Order

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

#Generations #Littles #Life Goes On

Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one’s living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest 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

#Writing #Civilization #Long

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

#Falling In Love #Cities #Firsts

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

#Believe #Would Be #World

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

#Invention #Sentences #Humans

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

#Art #Ideas #Poetry

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

#Writing #Light #Climate

I dont 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, its very difficult to find.
-- John Banville

#Individuality #Identity #Looks

With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.
-- John Banville

#Book #Crime #Novel

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

#Teenager #Reading #Artist

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

#Beautiful #Book #Kindles

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

#Novelists #Resilient #Novel

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

#Artist #Sentimental #Tough

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

#Past #Thinking #Live In The Present

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

#Writing #Careers #Giving

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

#Rooms

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

#Art #Sides #Doe

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

#Book #Way #Should

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

#Sentimental #Fiction #Matter

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

#Book #Past #Fantasy

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

#Fashion #Book #People

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

#Art #People #Littles

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

#Art #Tragedy #Levels

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

#Men #People #Men And Women

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

#Book #Judging #Worst

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

#Trying #Keep Trying #Duty

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

#Novelists #Philosopher #Wonderful

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

#Ideas #Behavior #Exciting

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

#Memories #Real #Oysters

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

#Book #Hard Work #Rewards

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

#Self #Doubt #Self-doubt

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

#Life Is #Comic #Tragic

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

#Hopeless #Century #19th Century

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

#Would Be #Critical

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

#Thinking

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

#Self #Arrogant #Impatient

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

#Scary #Physics #Cosmology

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

#Self #Soul #Toffee

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

#World #Indifference

He knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minuscule absence, a barely detective gap in the so-called grand scheme, one unit fewer now. Or not even that, not even an empty space where he once was, for all will rush immediately to fill that vacuum. Pft. Gone. Recollections of him will remain in the minds of others for a while, but presently those others too will die and his few relics with them. And then all will be dark.
-- John Banville

#Fear #Dark #Space

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

#Sleep #Dresses #Rehearsal

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

#Distance #Sound #Flats

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

#Life #Hate #I Hate

Enormous morning, ponderous, meticulous; gray light streaking each bare branch, each single twig, along one side, making another tree, of glassy veins.
-- John Banville

#Morning #Light #Tree

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

#Half #Letters #Firsts

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

#Nice #Giving #Bloody

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

#White #Mouths #May

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

#Hate #Night #Thinking

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s devoted Beckett readers greeted each successively shorter volume from the master with a mixture of awe and apprehensiveness; it was like watching a great mathematician wielding an infinitesimal calculus, his equations approaching nearer and still nearer to the null point.
-- John Banville

#Math #Null #Mixtures

In the city of flesh I travel without maps, a worried tourist: and Ottilie was a very Venice. I stumbled lost in the blue shade of her pavements. Here was a dreamy stillness, a swaying, the splash of an oar. Then, when I least expected it, suddenly I stepped out into the great square, the sunlight, and she was a flock of birds scattering with soft cries in my arms.
-- John Banville

#Squares #Blue #Cities

A plot begins when somebody has something to hide.
-- John Banville

#Writing #Plot

I have never really got used to being on this earth. Sometimes I think our presence here is due to a cosmic blunder, that we were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and other, grimmer skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, off on the far side of the galaxy, whirling and whirling. And the ones who were meant for here, are they out there, baffled and homesick, like us? No, they would have become extinct long ago. How could they survive, these gentle earthlings, in a world that was made to contain us.
-- John Banville

#Thinking #Law #Sky

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

#Hands

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

#Long #Leaving #Preparation

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

#Party #People #Paper

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

#Grief #Ocean #Waste

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

#Lying #Way #Lied

You will remember this when all else fades, this moment, here, together, by this well. There will be certain days, and certain nights, you’ll feel my presence near you, hear my voice. You’ll think you have imagined it and yet, inside you, you will catch an answering cry. On April evenings, when the rain has ceased, your heart will shake, you’ll weep for nothing, pine for what’s not there. For you, this life will never be enough, there will forever be an emptiness, where once the god was all in all in you.
-- John Banville

#Rain #Heart #Night

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

#Rain #Waiting #Mind

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

#Thinking #Museums #World

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

#Integrity #Men

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

#Civilization #Crafts #Invention

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

#Real #World #Language

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

#Land #Mud #Horizon

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

#Dog #Team #Frozen

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

#Sufficiency

These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses. It is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.
-- John Banville

#Mean #World #Way

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

#Imagination #Secret #Survival

Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.
-- John Banville

#Summer #Long #Childhood

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

#Baby #Mad #Way

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

#Self #Childhood #Matter