Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters. — John Banville Copy Share Image
In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there. — John Banville Copy Share Image
It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature. — John Banville Copy Share Image
Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher. — John Banville Copy Share Image
All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at… — John Banville Copy Share Image
I have this fantasy. I'm walking past a bookshop and I click my fingers and all my books go blank. So I… — John Banville Copy Share Image
When you're writing there's a deep, deep level of concentration way below your normal self. This strange voice, these strange sentences come… — John Banville Copy Share Image
When young writers approach me for advice, I remind them, as gently as I can, that they are on their own, with… — John Banville Copy Share Image
I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great… — John Banville Copy Share Image
I suppose it's possible that a writer would have feeling for his characters, but I can't see how, because writing is such… — John Banville Copy Share Image
Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one’s living… — John Banville Copy Share Image
“Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one’s living… — John Banville Copy Share Image
I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get. — John Banville Copy Share
“What did I brood on, sitting there in the classic pose with my elbows on my knees and my chin on my hands? We… — John Banville Copy Share
“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… — John Banville Copy Share
The effect of prizes on one's career - if that is what to call it - is considerable, since they give one more clout… — John Banville Copy Share
“Of all the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works. When darkness sifts from the… — John Banville Copy Share
“Yet even without saying, each knew what the other was thinking, and, more acutely, what the other was feeling -- this is a further… — John Banville Copy Share
“I have ever had the conviction, resistant to all rational considerations, that at some unspecified future moment the continuous rehearsal which is my life,… — John Banville Copy Share
“The novel is a kind of elephant. But I like to make that elephant dance on a quarter.” — John Banville Copy Share
Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart. — John Banville Copy Share
“At thee seaside all is narrow horizontals, the world reduced to a few long straight lines pressed between earth and sky.” — John Banville Copy Share
“It seems to me a work of art is the evidence offered by a fantastically observant witness” — John Banville Copy Share
Everything we do is tinged with the knowledge that this may be the last time that we will do this, and that makes what… — John Banville Copy Share
I like ideas. I find them more exciting than human behavior for the most part. — John Banville Copy Share
