Quote

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

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
Everything
Self
Failure
Doubt
Full

More quotes by John Banville

Image
The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
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
The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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
Everything we do is tinged with the knowledge that this may be the last time that we will do this, and that makes what we're doing incredibly sweet.
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
Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.
John Banville
Image
No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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
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
Image
I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
John Banville
Image
I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
John Banville
Image
And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
John Banville
Image
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
Image
...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
John Banville
Image
Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
John Banville
Image
All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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
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
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