John Banville Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• 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

  Art, People, Littles

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• If they give me the bloody prize, why can't they say nice things about me?

  John Banville

  Nice, Giving, Bloody

  Personal Profile, www.theguardian.com. July 22, 2008.

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• All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.

  John Banville

  Art, Tragedy, Levels

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• I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.

  John Banville

  Self, Doubt, Self-doubt

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• I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.

  John Banville

  Beautiful, Book, Kindles

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• In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.

  John Banville

  Book, Hard Work, Rewards

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• I live in Dublin, God knows why. There are greatly more congenial places I could have settled in - Italy, France, Manhattan - but I like the climate here, and Irish light seems to be essential for me and for my writing.

  John Banville

  Writing, Light, Climate

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• All I wanted was to be left alone. They abhor a vacuum, other people. You find a quiet corner where you can hunker down in peace, and the next minute there they are, crowding around you in their party hats, tooting their paper whistles in your face and insisting you get up and join in the knees-up.

  John Banville

  Party, People, Vacuums

  John Banville (2011). “Eclipse”, p.145, Pan Macmillan

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• The first thought that occurred to me, that night when I heard the chairman of the jury announce my name, was, Just think how many people hate me at this moment. Naturally, I wanted to annoy those people even further by being arrogant.

  John Banville

  Hate, Night, Thinking

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

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• The effect of prizes on one's career - if that is what to call it - is considerable, since they give one more clout with publishers and more notoriety among journalists. The effect on one's writing, however, is nil - otherwise, one would be in deep trouble.

  John Banville

  Writing, Careers, Giving

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• It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.

  John Banville

  Fashion, Book, People

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• You will remember this when all else fades, this moment, here, together, by this well. There will be certain days, and certain nights, you’ll feel my presence near you, hear my voice. You’ll think you have imagined it and yet, inside you, you will catch an answering cry. On April evenings, when the rain has ceased, your heart will shake, you’ll weep for nothing, pine for what’s not there. For you, this life will never be enough, there will forever be an emptiness, where once the god was all in all in you.

  John Banville

  Rain, Heart, Night

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• The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.

  John Banville

  Book, Way, Should

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• The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

  John Banville

  Novelists, Resilient, Novel

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• ...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left

  John Banville

  Rooms, Left

  John Banville (2008). “The Sea”, p.83, Pan Macmillan

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• 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 the so-called grand scheme, one unit fewer now. Or not even that, not even an empty space where he once was, for all will rush immediately to fill that vacuum. Pft. Gone. Recollections of him will remain in the minds of others for a while, but presently those others too will die and his few relics with them. And then all will be dark.

  John Banville

  Fear, Dark, Space

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• 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 were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and other, grimmer skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, off on the far side of the galaxy, whirling and whirling. And the ones who were meant for here, are they out there, baffled and homesick, like us? No, they would have become extinct long ago. How could they survive, these gentle earthlings, in a world that was made to contain us.

  John Banville

  Thinking, Long Ago, Law

  John Banville (2014). “The Book of Evidence: Picador Classic”, p.26, Pan Macmillan

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• The trouble with you, Vic," he said, "is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.

  John Banville

  Thinking, Museums, World

  John Banville (2009). “The Untouchable”, p.58, Vintage

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• 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 am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.

  John Banville

  Mean, World, Way

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• We artists love to talk tough, but we're just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it.

  John Banville

  Artist, Sentimental, Tough

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• I am the worst judge of my books.

  John Banville

  Book, Judging, Worst

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• The secret of survival is a defective imagination.

  John Banville

  Imagination, Secret, Survival

  John Banville (2010). “The Infinities”, p.37, Pan Macmillan

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

  John Banville

  Ideas, Behavior, Exciting

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• 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 clamouring for attention when you least expect it, like a mad baby.

  John Banville

  Baby, Mad, Attention

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• 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 of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.

  John Banville

  Summer, Long, Childhood

  John Banville (2008). “The Sea”, p.94, Pan Macmillan

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