Quotes by John Banville

About John Banville:

William John Banville is an Irish novelist, adapter of dramas, and screenwriter. Recognised for his precise, cold, forensic prose style, Nabokovian inventiveness, and for the dark humour of his generally arch narrators, Banville is considered to be "one of the most imaginative literary novelists writing in the English language today." He has been described as "the heir to Proust, via Nabokov."
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

There is something about gin, the tang in it of the deep wildwood, perhaps, that always makes me think of twilight and mists and dead maidens. Tonight it tinkled in my mouth like secret laughter.

John Banville

I want my art to make people look at the world in a new way. I mean, what's the point of the art of writing if it doesn't take you into the mysterious?

John Banville

All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.

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

When I look back all is flux, without beginning and flowing towards no end, or none that I shall experience, except as a final full stop. The items of flotsam that I choose to salvage from the general wreckage—and what is a life but a gradual shipw...

John Banville

He knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minuscule absence, a barely detective gap in the so-called grand scheme, one unit fewer now. Or not even that, not even an empty space where he once was, ...

John Banville

Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works.

John Banville

You 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 voice. You’ll think you have imagined it and yet, inside you, you wil...

John Banville

The secret of survival is a defective imagination.

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

Yes, 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 of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was sma...

John Banville

Although it was autumn and not summer the dark-gold sunlight and the inky shadows, long and slender in the shape of felled cypresses, were the same, and there was the same sense of everything drenched and jewelled and the same ultramarine glitter on ...

John Banville

Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search for shelter, for comfort, for, yes, I admit it, for co...

John Banville

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.

John Banville

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

John Banville

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...

John Banville

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.

John Banville

You know, artists don't really have all that much experience of life. We make a huge amount out of the small experience that we do have.

John Banville

I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.

John Banville

With the crime novels, it's delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. It's like having a fictitious family.

John Banville

Author Bio

  • NameJohn Banville
  • DescriptionIrish writer
  • AliasesBenjamin Black; William John Banville
  • BornDecember 8, 1945
  • CountryIreland
  • ProfessionScreenwriter; Novelist; Writer; Playwright
  • WorksThe Book Of Evidence; Ghosts; Eclipse; Shroud; The Sea; The Infinities; Ancient Light
  • AwardsAustrian State Prize For European Literature; James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Franz Kafka Prize; Prince Of Asturia Literary Prize