John Banville Quotes - Page 2

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Art Books Heart Past Writing

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 of her pavements. Here was a dreamy stillness, a swaying, the splash of an oar. Then, when I least expected it, suddenly I stepped out into the great square, the sunlight, and she was a flock of birds scattering with soft cries in my arms.

John Banville

Cities, Venice, Squares

John Banville (2011). “The Newton Letter”, p.31, Pan Macmillan

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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

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With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.

John Banville

Book, Crime Novels, Protagonists

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What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.

John Banville

Grief, Ocean, Weight

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That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business.

John Banville

Life, Hate, I Hate

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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

Book, Past, Fantasy

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All one wants to do is make a small, finished, polished, burnished, beautiful object . . . I mean, that's all one wants to do. One has nothing to say about the world, or society, or morals or politics or anything else. One just wants to get the damn thing done, you know? Kafka had it right when he said that the artist is the man who has nothing to say. It's true. You get the thing done, but you don't actually have anything to communicate, apart from the object itself.

John Banville

Beautiful, Mean, Artist

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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?

John Banville

Dog, Team, Frozen

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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.

John Banville

Sleep, Dresses, Rehearsal

John Banville (2012). “Ancient Light”, p.237, Vintage

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When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it's finished. A certain point comes at which you can't do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence.

John Banville

Certain, Labor, Sentences

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

John Banville

Novelists, Philosopher, Wonderful

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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.

John Banville

Thinking, Written

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The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.

John Banville

Real, World, Language

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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.

John Banville

Science, Two, Scandal

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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.

John Banville

World, Indifference, Happened

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I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.

John Banville

Scary, Physics, Cosmology

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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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The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.

John Banville

White, Mouths, May

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

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

John Banville

Would Be, Critical, Reviewers

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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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Throughout the 1960s and 1970s devoted Beckett readers greeted each successively shorter volume from the master with a mixture of awe and apprehensiveness; it was like watching a great mathematician wielding an infinitesimal calculus, his equations approaching nearer and still nearer to the null point.

John Banville

Math, Null, Mixtures

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Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.

John Banville

Believe, Would Be, World

John Banville (2008). “The Sea”, p.185, Pan Macmillan

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Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.

John Banville

Art, Fiction, Sides

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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 off desperately toward the horizon as if in mute search for a sign of rescue.

John Banville

Land, Horizon, Littles

John Banville (2008). “The Sea”, p.112, Pan Macmillan

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Born: December 8, 1945
Occupation: Novelist
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