John Banville Quotes

71 quotes in 1077 categories

• I have this fantasy. I'm walking past a bookshop and I click my fingers and all my books go blank. So I can start again…
• It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.
• 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…
• All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
• Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don't do well, in the hope of…
• Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.
• For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create…
• I am the worst judge of my books.
• I don't make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people.
• I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
• I like ideas. I find them more exciting than human behavior for the most part.
• I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
• I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
• I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.
• I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.
• I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
• I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
• If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
• In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.
• Life is tragic but it's equally comic.

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