John BanvilleI 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.373ReadingTime
John BanvilleWe think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.332LifeThoughtTime
John BanvilleThe 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 (2009). The Untouchable, p.58,… ▶321Thought
John BanvilleThe 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 … ▶354Reading
John BanvilleThere are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I know seems to have fallen out of my mind like a shower of rain, and … ▶366ThoughtTime
John BanvilleThe secret of survival is a defective imagination. ✨ John Banville (2010). The Infinities, p.37, Pan Macmillan377Death
John BanvilleI'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic. ✨ John Banville: a life in writing. Interview with Stuart Jeffries, www.theguardian.com. June 29, 2012.334HopeLife
John BanvilleFor 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.301Time
John BanvillePerhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it. ✨ John Banville (2008). The Sea, p.98, Pan Macmillan379Life
John BanvilleYes, 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… ▶368PoliticsThoughtTime
John BanvilleMost crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.304Time
John BanvilleWhat is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it.315Humanity
John BanvilleA man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.261Reflection
John BanvilleYou 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 vo… ▶338LifeLoveSadness
John BanvilleI don't make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people.338Humanity
John BanvilleI 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 a… ▶327PoliticsReadingThought
John BanvilleAll art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.273Life
John BanvilleThe novel is resilient, and so are novelists.307Reading
John BanvilleIn my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.297Reading
John BanvilleI would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.243Reading
John BanvilleThe past beats inside me like a second heart. ✨ John Banville (2012). Possessed of a Past: A John Banville Reader, p.2, Pan Macmillan299LoveReadingTime
John BanvilleWe 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… ▶299DeathReading
John BanvilleWriting keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one's living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest inven… ▶223HumanityLife
John BanvilleWhere I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand. ✨ John Banville (2011). Mefisto, p.110, Pan Macmillan212Politics
John BanvilleTo take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there. ✨ John Banville (2009). The Untouchable, p.31, Vintage245Love
John BanvilleI've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.234Truth
John BanvilleDoing 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, The Art of Fiction No. 200. Inter… ▶223DeathHope
John BanvilleThe sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.279Humanity
John BanvilleThe 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 effec… ▶213Reflection
John BanvilleIf I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.2810Humanity
