John Banville Quotes

Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege ...

He knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minu...

You will remember this when all else fades, this moment, here, together, by this well. There will be...

The secret of survival is a defective imagination.

There is something about gin, the tang in it of the deep wildwood, perhaps, that always makes me thi...

We imagine that we remember things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are frag...

When I look back all is flux, without beginning and flowing towards no end, or none that I shall exp...

The dead are my dark matter, filling up impalpably the empty spaces of the world.

He had scores to settle with the world, and she, at that moment, was world enough for him.

In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.

When I started writing, I was a great rationalist and believed I was absolutely in control. But the ...

Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise ...

Still the dream persists, suppressed but always there, that somehow by some miraculous effort of the...

What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and ...

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

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then ...

I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.

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

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

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

I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a...

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything see...

Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility...

Although it was autumn and not summer the dark-gold sunlight and the inky shadows, long and slender ...

Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, but when I ...

We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little ...