I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure. — 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
I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant. — 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
I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling… — John Banville Copy Share Image
Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new… — 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
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
