Best 89 quotes of John Banville on MyQuotes

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

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.

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.

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.

All one wants to do is make a small, finished, polished, burnished, beautiful object . . . I mean, that's all one wants to do. One has nothing to say about the world, or society, or morals or politics or anything else. One just wants to get the damn thing done, you know? Kafka had it right when he said that the artist is the man who has nothing to say. It's true. You get the thing done, but you don't actually have anything to communicate, apart from the object itself.

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

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

A plot begins when somebody has something to hide.

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

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Life is tragic but it's equally comic.

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

No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

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.

The secret of survival is a defective imagination.

The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.