Quote

A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.

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
Depend
Integrity
Depends
Others
Nothing
Much
Men

More quotes by 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've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
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
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
Image
And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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
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
I am the worst judge of my books.
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
The effect of prizes on one's career - if that is what to call it - is considerable, since they give one more clout with publishers and more notoriety among journalists. The effect on one's writing, however, is nil - otherwise, one would be in deep trouble.
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
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
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
I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
John Banville
Image
Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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 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
We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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