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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

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 publishers and more notoriety among journalists. The effect on one’s writing, however, is nil – otherwise, one would be in deep trouble.

– John Banville

Office life is very, very strange. It’s like no other way of living. You have an intimacy with people who you work with in the office, yet if you meet them on the streets, you both look the other way because you’re embarrassed.

– John Banville

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

– John Banville

We writers are shy, nocturnal creatures. Push us into the light and the light blinds us.

– John Banville

I don’t make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people.

– John Banville

When young writers approach me for advice, I remind them, as gently as I can, that they are on their own, with no help available anywhere. Which is how it should be.

– John Banville

I don’t 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, it’s very difficult to find.

– John Banville

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

You can’t write about fantasy without being ridiculous.

– John Banville

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

– John Banville

When you’re writing there’s a deep, deep level of concentration way below your normal self. This strange voice, these strange sentences come out of you.

– John Banville

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.

– John Banville

I’ve been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he’s a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist – I’d put novelist last.

– John Banville

I sometimes think that I might be slightly autistic. There might be a syndrome that hasn’t been named. I don’t seem to see the world in the same way that most people I know see it. They don’t seem to be baffled by it.

– John Banville

We think we’re living in the present, but we’re really living in the past.

– John Banville

I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don’t read them.

– John Banville

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

I know some of my memories are made up and they are far more powerful than the things that actually happened. For example, I always remember my brother posting me a copy of ‘Dubliners’ from Africa, but he says he never did.

– John Banville

I never went to university. I’m self-educated. I didn’t go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.

– John Banville

Death is such a strange thing. One minute you’re here and then just gone. You’d think there would be an anteroom, a place where you could be visited before you go.

– John Banville

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

– John Banville

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

Why does the past seem so magical, so fraught, so luminous? At the time it was just, ugh, another boring bloody day. But, to look back on, it’s a day full of miracles and light and extraordinary events. Why is this? What process do we apply to the past, to give it this vividness? I don’t know.

– John Banville

When I started writing, I was a great rationalist and believed I was absolutely in control. But the older one gets, the more confused, and for an artist I think that is quite a good thing: you allow in more of your instinctual self; your dreams, fantasies and memories. It’s richer, in a way.

– John Banville

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

– John Banville

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

– John Banville

Most crime fiction, no matter how ‘hard-boiled’ or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.

– John Banville

How I envy writers who can work on aeroplanes or in hotel rooms. On the run I can produce an article or a book review, or even a film script, but for fiction I must have my own desk, my own wall with my own postcards pinned to it, and my own window not to look out of.

– John Banville

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

– John Banville

My work is frequently described as cold, which is baffling, since it seems to me embarrassingly, shame-makingly, scandalously warm. I find my work filled with sentiment, and I can’t imagine why people find it cold.

– John Banville

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