Quote

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

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
Way
Lied
Life
Escape
Lies
Loved
Almost
Lying
Living
Anagrams
Power
Placement

More quotes by 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
We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
John Banville
Image
The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
John Banville
Image
I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
John Banville
Image
...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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
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
In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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
I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
John Banville
Image
The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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
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 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
Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
John Banville
Image
Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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
A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.
John Banville
Image
Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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