A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him. — 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
And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference. — John Banville Copy Share Image
To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there. — John Banville Copy Share Image
Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics. — John Banville Copy Share Image
“I would have made her a part of me. If I could, I would have had a notch cut in my already… — John Banville Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“When he was young, the lesson learned from his mother, as much by cuffs as caresses, was that love is action--what you… — 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
“This love, this mortal love, is of their own making," Hermes muses, "the thing we did not intend, foresee or sanction. How… — 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
