John Banville Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• 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

  4 Copy quote

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

  John Banville

  Self, Arrogant, Impatient

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• How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.

  John Banville

  Distance, Sound, Flats

  John Banville (2008). “The Sea”, p.30, Pan Macmillan

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• I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.

  John Banville

  Self, Soul, Toffee

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• 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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• Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.

  John Banville

  Half, Letters, Firsts

  "A Day in the Life". New York Review of Books Article, www.nybooks.com. May 26, 2005.

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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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• Enormous morning, ponderous, meticulous; gray light streaking each bare branch, each single twig, along one side, making another tree, of glassy veins.

  John Banville

  Morning, Light, Tree

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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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• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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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• ...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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• 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

  7 Copy quote

• I am the worst judge of my books.

  John Banville

  Book, Judging, Worst

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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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• 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 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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• 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 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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