John Banville Quotes
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.
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.
If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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.
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.
To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.
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.
A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.
Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.
Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.
I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.
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 the frozen wastes?
All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.
In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.
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.
It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.
We artists love to talk tough, but we're just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it.
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.
Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.
Enormous morning, ponderous, meticulous; gray light streaking each bare branch, each single twig, along one side, making another tree, of glassy veins.
...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.
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.
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.
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.
Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.
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 and get it right.
