I want my art to make people look at the world in a new way. I mean, what's the point of the… — John Banville Copy Share Image
We artists love to talk tough, but we're just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it. — John Banville Copy Share Image
“It seems to me a work of art is the evidence offered by a fantastically observant witness” — John Banville Copy Share Image
All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little… — John Banville Copy Share Image
All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained. — John Banville Copy Share Image
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 Image
I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties,… — John Banville Copy Share Image
When I started writing, I was a great rationalist and believed I was absolutely in control. But the older one gets, the… — John Banville Copy Share Image
Poetry is that magic which consists in awakening sensations with the help of a combination of sounds ... that sorcery by which… — John Banville Copy Share Image
All one wants to do is make a small, finished, polished, burnished, beautiful object . . . I mean, that's all one… — John Banville Copy Share Image
You know, artists don't really have all that much experience of life. We make a huge amount out of the small experience… — John Banville Copy Share Image
When fans of mine meet me, I can see the disappointment in their eyes. Every artist knows of this phenomenon. — 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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“The novel is a kind of elephant. But I like to make that elephant dance on a quarter.” — John Banville Copy Share Image
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 Image
“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 Image
