John Banville

I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.

— John Banville

“What did I brood on, sitting there in the classic pose with my elbows on my knees and my chin on my…

— John Banville

“Her own mother had died when Anna was twelve and since then father and daughter had faced the world like a pair…

— John Banville

The effect of prizes on one's career - if that is what to call it - is considerable, since they give one…

— John Banville

“Of all the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works. When darkness sifts…

— John Banville

I am the worst judge of my books.

— John Banville

“Yet even without saying, each knew what the other was thinking, and, more acutely, what the other was feeling -- this is…

— John Banville

“I have ever had the conviction, resistant to all rational considerations, that at some unspecified future moment the continuous rehearsal which is…

— John Banville

“The novel is a kind of elephant. But I like to make that elephant dance on a quarter.”

— John Banville

“Whom now would I love, and who would love me?”

— John Banville

Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.

— John Banville

“At thee seaside all is narrow horizontals, the world reduced to a few long straight lines pressed between earth and sky.”

— John Banville

“It seems to me a work of art is the evidence offered by a fantastically observant witness”

— John Banville

Everything we do is tinged with the knowledge that this may be the last time that we will do this, and that…

— John Banville

I like ideas. I find them more exciting than human behavior for the most part.

— John Banville

“And incredulity, that too was a large part of being happy. I mean that euphoric inability fully to believe in one’s own…

— John Banville

I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.

— John Banville

“This love, this mortal love, is of their own making," Hermes muses, "the thing we did not intend, foresee or sanction. How…

— John Banville

I want my art to make people look at the world in a new way. I mean, what's the point of the…

— John Banville

Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.

— John Banville

He knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minuscule absence, a barely…

— John Banville

Enormous morning, ponderous, meticulous; gray light streaking each bare branch, each single twig, along one side, making another tree, of glassy veins.

— John Banville

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

— John Banville

Life is tragic but it's equally comic.

— John Banville

That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business.

— John Banville