John Banville Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

More John Banville quote about:

“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

#Writing #Character #Exercise
“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”
-- John Banville

#Heart #Past #Beats
“In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.”
-- John Banville

#Writing #Self #Order
“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

#Generations #Littles #Life Goes On
“Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make oneâ€™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 couldnâ€™t ask for anything better. Itâ€™s as near to godliness as I can get.”
-- John Banville

#Writing #Civilization #Long
“To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.”
-- John Banville

#Falling In Love #Cities #Firsts
“Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.”
-- John Banville

#Believe #Would Be #World
“If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.”
-- John Banville

#Invention #Sentences #Humans
“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

#Art #Ideas #Poetry
“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
“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

#Individuality #Identity #Looks
“With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.”
-- John Banville

#Book #Crime #Novel
“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

#Teenager #Reading #Artist
“I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.”
-- John Banville

#Beautiful #Book #Kindles
“The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.”
-- John Banville

#Novelists #Resilient #Novel
“We artists love to talk tough, but we're just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it.”
-- John Banville

#Artist #Sentimental #Tough
“We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.”
-- John Banville

#Past #Thinking #Live In The Present
“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
“...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left”
-- John Banville

#Rooms
“Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.”
-- John Banville

#Art #Sides #Doe
“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
“Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.”
-- John Banville

#Sentimental #Fiction #Matter
“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

#Book #Past #Fantasy
“It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.”
-- John Banville

#Fashion #Book #People
“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
“All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.”
-- John Banville

#Art #Tragedy #Levels
“I don't make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people.”
-- John Banville

#Men #People #Men And Women
“I am the worst judge of my books.”
-- John Banville

#Book #Judging #Worst
“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

#Trying #Keep Trying #Duty
“Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.”
-- John Banville

#Novelists #Philosopher #Wonderful

Top 25 Quotes By John Banville Of 78 A Z Quotes

132 John Banville Quotes On Memories God S Love And The Sea Quotes Pub

Top 90 John Banville Quotes 2021 Update Quotefancy

You may also like:

Anne Enright
Author
Carlos Fuentes
Novelist
Colm Toibin
Novelist
David Mitchell
Novelist
Elizabeth Bowen
Novelist
Enrique Vila-Matas
Novelist
Gabriel Byrne
Actor
George A. Moore
Novelist
Ian Mcewan
Novelist
J. M. Coetzee
Novelist
James Joyce
Novelist
John McGahern
Writer
Julian Barnes
Writer
Kazuo Ishiguro
Novelist
Marcel Proust
Novelist
Peter Carey
Novelist
Philip Roth
Novelist
Samuel Beckett
Novelist
Vladimir Nabokov
Novelist
William Trevor
Novelist