John Banville Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“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 -
“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 -
“I dont know if there is a personal identity. We all imagine that we are absolute individuals. But when we begin to look for where this individuality resides, its very difficult to find.”
-- John Banville -
“With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.”
-- John Banville -
“I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist.”
-- John Banville -
“I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.”
-- John Banville -
“The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.”
-- John Banville -
“We artists love to talk tough, but we're just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it.”
-- John Banville -
“We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.”
-- John Banville -
“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 -
“...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left”
-- John Banville -
“Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.”
-- John Banville -
“The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.”
-- John Banville -
“Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.”
-- John Banville -
“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 -
“It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.”
-- John Banville -
“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 -
“All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.”
-- John Banville -
“I don't make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people.”
-- John Banville -
“Doing 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 -
“Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.”
-- John Banville
