All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself. — 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 air like fine soft soot and light spreads slowly out of the east then all but the most wretched of humankind rally. It is a spectacle we immortals enjoy, this minor daily resurrection, often we will… — John Banville Copy Share
“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, with its so many misreadings, is slips and fluffs, will be done with and that the real drama for which I have ever and with earnestness been preparing will at last begin. It is a common… — John Banville Copy Share
“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
