Quote

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

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
Personal
Resides
Imagine
Dont
Individual
Individuality
Difficult
Absolutes
Find
Absolute
Look
Individuals
Looks
Identity
Begin

More quotes by John Banville

Image
The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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
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
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
No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
John Banville
Image
Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
John Banville
Image
I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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
I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
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
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
All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
John Banville
Image
Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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
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
In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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
...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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
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