Quote

I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.

John Banville

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Banville
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Less
Think
Thinking
Writer
Written

More quotes by John Banville

Image
The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
John Banville
Image
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
Image
Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.
John Banville
Image
Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
John Banville
Image
...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
John Banville
Image
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
Image
I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
John Banville
Image
Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
John Banville
Image
A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.
John Banville
Image
With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.
John Banville
Image
The first thought that occurred to me, that night when I heard the chairman of the jury announce my name, was, Just think how many people hate me at this moment. Naturally, I wanted to annoy those people even further by being arrogant.
John Banville
Image
Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
John Banville
Image
If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
John Banville
Image
And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
John Banville
Image
I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
John Banville
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
John Banville
Image
All I wanted was to be left alone. They abhor a vacuum, other people. You find a quiet corner where you can hunker down in peace, and the next minute there they are, crowding around you in their party hats, tooting their paper whistles in your face and insisting you get up and join in the knees-up.
John Banville
Image
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