That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business. — John Banville Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past. — 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
These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses. It is a sort of homeopathic cure I am… — John Banville Copy Share Image
“Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, but when I look back I see that the… — John Banville Copy Share Image
Office life is very, very strange. It's like no other way of living. You have an intimacy with people who you work… — John Banville Copy Share Image
“In this new life I am condemned to, is there nothing that is not open to doubt?” — John Banville Copy Share Image
All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I… — John Banville Copy Share Image
“When I look back all is flux, without beginning and flowing towards no end, or none that I shall experience, except as… — 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
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
What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark… — John Banville Copy Share Image
Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it. — 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
