John Banville Quotes and Sayings
-
“Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.”
-- John Banville -
“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”
-- John Banville -
“In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.”
-- John Banville -
“We 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 generations.”
-- John Banville -
“Writing 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 invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. I couldn’t ask for anything better. It’s as near to godliness as I can get.”
-- John Banville -
“To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.”
-- John Banville -
“Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.”
-- John Banville -
“If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.”
-- John Banville -
“Poetry is that magic which consists in awakening sensations with the help of a combination of sounds ... that sorcery by which ideas are necessarily communicated to us, in a definite way, by words which nevertheless do not express them.”
-- John Banville