John Banville

A plot begins when somebody has something to hide.

— John Banville

The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

— John Banville

Life is tragic but it's equally comic.

— John Banville

“Whom now would I love, and who would love me?”

— John Banville

I am the worst judge of my books.

— John Banville

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

— John Banville

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

— John Banville

I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.

— 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

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

— John Banville

“The novel is a kind of elephant. But I like to make that elephant dance on a quarter.”

— John Banville

“In this new life I am condemned to, is there nothing that is not open to doubt?”

— John Banville

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

— John Banville

“It seems to me a work of art is the evidence offered by a fantastically observant witness”

— 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

“The tea-bag is a vile invention suggestive to my perhaps overly squeamish eye of something a careless person might leave behind unflushed…

— John Banville

I know some of my memories are made up and they are far more powerful than the things that actually happened. For…

— John Banville

The effect of prizes on one's career - if that is what to call it - is considerable, since they give one…

— John Banville

I'd given up Catholicism in my teens but something of it stays with me. I try to create the perfect sentence -…

— John Banville

All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at…

— John Banville

“Guilt is the only affect I know of that does not diminish with time. Nor does the guilty conscience have any sense…

— John Banville

“The big rippled sheets of glass were taken out of their sacking and lowered from the back of the wagon, and for…

— 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

All one wants to do is make a small, finished, polished, burnished, beautiful object . . . I mean, that's all one…

— John Banville

“None of this means anything. Anything of significance, that is. I am just amusing myself, musing, losing myself in a welter of…

— John Banville

“Memory is imagination, and imagination is memory. I don’t think we remember the past, we imagine it. We take a few props…

— John Banville

In the city of flesh I travel without maps, a worried tourist: and Ottilie was a very Venice. I stumbled lost in…

— John Banville

Why does the past seem so magical, so fraught, so luminous? At the time it was just, ugh, another boring bloody day.…

— John Banville

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s devoted Beckett readers greeted each successively shorter volume from the master with a mixture of awe and…

— John Banville

“Together they will spend a happy hour seated side by side..., while Ivy's tender hand guides Duffy's as he traces out laboriously,…

— John Banville

What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark…

— John Banville

“This love, this mortal love, is of their own making," Hermes muses, "the thing we did not intend, foresee or sanction. How…

— John Banville

“It was not just the drink, though, that was making me happy, but the tenderness of things, the simple goodness of the…

— John Banville

“Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, the will butting its blunt head against the world's…

— John Banville

I have never really got used to being on this earth. Sometimes I think our presence here is due to a cosmic…

— John Banville

“I have ever had the conviction, resistant to all rational considerations, that at some unspecified future moment the continuous rehearsal which is…

— John Banville

“I was thinking of Anna. I make myself think of her, I do it as an exercise. She is lodged in me…

— John Banville

“When I look back, no matter how hard I try I can see clear break between one phase and another. It is…

— John Banville

“And incredulity, that too was a large part of being happy. I mean that euphoric inability fully to believe in one’s own…

— John Banville