John Banville Quotes

Quotes about:

Art Books Heart Past Writing

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 easily killed off.

John Banville

Writing, Character, Exercise

FaceBook post by John Banville from Nov 16, 2012

45 Copy quote
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 a pearl around them.

John Banville

Memories, Real, Oysters

9 Copy quote
A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.

John Banville

Integrity, Men, Depends

10 Copy quote
Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.

John Banville

Long, Leaving, Preparation

John Banville (2008). “The Sea”, p.98, Pan Macmillan

5 Copy quote
The past beats inside me like a second heart.

John Banville

Heart, Past, Beats

John Banville (2012). “Possessed of a Past: A John Banville Reader”, p.2, Pan Macmillan

15 Copy quote
All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie. It was a way of living; lies are life's almost-anagram.

John Banville

Lying, Way, Lied

John Banville (2011). “Shroud”, p.12, Pan Macmillan

15 Copy quote
In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.

John Banville

Writing, Self, Order

17 Copy quote
Everything we do is tinged with the knowledge that this may be the last time that we will do this, and that makes what we're doing incredibly sweet.

John Banville

Sweet, May, Lasts

11 Copy quote
I dont know if there is a personal identity. We all imagine that we are absolute individuals. But when we begin to look for where this individuality resides, its very difficult to find.

John Banville

Individuality, Identity, Looks

4 Copy quote
A plot begins when somebody has something to hide.

John Banville

Writing, Plot

"'A Death In Summer' Starts With A Mysterious Suicide". Interview with Scott Simon, www.npr.org. July 2, 2011.

5 Copy quote
We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.

John Banville

Past, Thinking, Live In The Present

4 Copy quote
I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.

John Banville

Hopeless, Century, 19th Century

"John Banville: a life in writing". Interview with Stuart Jeffries, www.theguardian.com. June 29, 2012.

4 Copy quote
If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.

John Banville

Invention, Sentences, Humans

14 Copy quote
Poetry is that magic which consists in awakening sensations with the help of a combination of sounds ... that sorcery by which ideas are necessarily communicated to us, in a definite way, by words which nevertheless do not express them.

John Banville

Art, Ideas, Poetry

4 Copy quote
What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it.

John Banville

Sufficiency

4 Copy quote
There are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I know seems to have fallen out of my mind like a shower of rain, and I am gripped for a moment in paralysed dismay, waiting for it all to come back but with no certainty that it will.

John Banville

Rain, Waiting, Mind

9 Copy quote
Life is tragic but it's equally comic.

John Banville

Life Is, Comic, Tragic

4 Copy quote
Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self.

John Banville

New Experiences, Self, Childhood

FaceBook post by John Banville from Oct 15, 2016

11 Copy quote
To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.

John Banville

Falling In Love, Cities, Firsts

John Banville (2009). “The Untouchable”, p.31, Vintage

10 Copy quote
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. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. I couldn't ask for anything better. It's as near to godliness as I can get.

John Banville

Writing, Civilization, Long

"John Banville, The Art of Fiction No. 200". Interview with Belinda McKeon, www.theparisreview.org. 2009.

8 Copy quote
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 learning.

John Banville

Trying, Keep Trying, Duty

"John Banville, The Art of Fiction No. 200". Interview with Belinda McKeon, The Paris Review, Issue 188, www.theparisreview.org. Spring 2009.

5 Copy quote
We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.

John Banville

Generations, Littles, Life Goes On

FaceBook post by John Banville from Dec 16, 2012

10 Copy quote
The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

John Banville

Civilization, Crafts, Invention

4 Copy quote
I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist.

John Banville

Teenager, Reading, Artist

4 Copy quote
Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.

John Banville

Hands

John Banville (2011). “Mefisto”, p.110, Pan Macmillan

4 Copy quote

You May Also Like:

Enrique Vila-Matas

John Banville

Follow

Born: December 8, 1945
Occupation: Novelist
Cite this Page: Citation

Popular Topics