Quote

We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.

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
Present
Living
Past
Really
Think
Thinking

More quotes by John Banville

Image
Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
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
Ian McEwan is a very good writer the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.
John Banville
Image
I am the worst judge of my books.
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
I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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
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
Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
John Banville
Image
...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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
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
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
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 secret of survival is a defective imagination.
John Banville
Image
I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
John Banville
Image
The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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
And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
John Banville