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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.

John Banville

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John Banville
Age: 78
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Defective
Survival
Imagination
Secret

More quotes by John Banville

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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.
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I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.
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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.
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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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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.
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If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
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A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.
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I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
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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.
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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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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.
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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.
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Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.
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Ian McEwan is a very good writer the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.
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I am the worst judge of my books.
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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.
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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
John Banville