Best John Banville Quotes
- The effect of prizes on one's career - if that is what to call it - is considerable, since they give one more clout with… Among
- A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him. Depend
- The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization. Civilization
- The telephone ringing gave me a dreadful start. I have never got used to this machine, the way it crouches so malevolently, ready to start… Attention
- Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left… Adulthood
- The secret of survival is a defective imagination. Defective
- These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses. It is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I… Amongst
- What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it. All
- Dogs are dim creatures, do not speak to me of their good sense--have you ever heard of a team of tomcats hauling a sled across… Across
- I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking… Desperately
- The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language. Been
- I have never really got used to being on this earth. Sometimes I think our presence here is due to a cosmic blunder, that we… Ago
- A plot begins when somebody has something to hide. Begins
- Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one’s living from writing sentences.… All
- In the city of flesh I travel without maps, a worried tourist: and Ottilie was a very Venice. I stumbled lost in the blue shade… Arms
- Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead. Always Found
- He knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minuscule absence, a barely detective gap in… Absence
- Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as… Born
- And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference. Great
- I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I… Away Layer
- How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance. All
- ...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left Alone
- Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him. Believe
- To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there. Cities
- Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart. Accept