Quote

If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.

John Banville

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Banville
Age: 78
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Would
Sentence
Sentences
Invention
Beings
Asked
Greatest
Human
Humans

More quotes by 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 think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
John Banville
Image
Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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 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
All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
John Banville
Image
We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
John Banville
Image
I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
John Banville
Image
In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
John Banville
Image
The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
John Banville
Image
All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power I lied to lie. It was a way of living lies are life's almost-anagram.
John Banville
Image
The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
John Banville
Image
I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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
The trouble with you, Vic, he said, is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.
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
Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.
John Banville
Image
There are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I know seems to have fallen out of my mind like a shower of rain, and I am gripped for a moment in paralysed dismay, waiting for it all to come back but with no certainty that it will.
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
Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.
John Banville