I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them. — John Banville Copy Share Image
In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite… — John Banville Copy Share Image
My work is frequently described as cold, which is baffling, since it seems to me embarrassingly, shame-makingly, scandalously warm. I find my… — 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
When I say I don't like my own work, that doesn't mean it isn't better than everyone else's. — 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
How I envy writers who can work on aeroplanes or in hotel rooms. On the run I can produce an article or… — 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
