Quote

The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

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
Greatest
Human
Humans
Sentence
Crafts
Sentences
Invention
Civilization

More quotes by John Banville

Image
I live in Dublin, God knows why. There are greatly more congenial places I could have settled in - Italy, France, Manhattan - but I like the climate here, and Irish light seems to be essential for me and for my writing.
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
Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.
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
A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.
John Banville
Image
Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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
If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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 think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
John Banville
Image
Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
John Banville
Image
And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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
...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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
I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
John Banville
Image
All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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
In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
John Banville