John Banville Quotes - Page 2

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

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

Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.