Top 100 John Banville Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The past beats inside me like a second heart.”

— John Banville

2. “The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that’s the way it should be.”

— John Banville

3. “A man is not much if he can’t depend on himself, and nothing if others can’t depend on him.”

— John Banville

4. “I’m full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.”

— John Banville

5. “The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.”

— John Banville

6. “What is my purpose here? I may say, I just sat down to write, but I am not deceived. I have never done anything in my life that did not have a purpose, usually hidden, sometimes even from myself.”

— John Banville

7. “For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.”

— John Banville

8. “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

9. “What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it.”

— John Banville

10. “I never went to university. I’m self-educated. I didn’t go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.”

— John Banville

11. “Time and age have brought not wisdom, as they are supposed to do, but confusion, and a broadening incomprehension, each year laying down another ring of nesience.”

— John Banville

12. “Let us say, the present is where we live, while the past is where we dream.”

— John Banville

13. “Lots of water under that bridge, let’s not drown ourselves in it.”

— John Banville

14. “I think I am becoming my own ghost.”

— John Banville

15. “Enormous morning, ponderous, meticulous; gray light streaking each bare branch, each single twig, along one side, making another tree, of glassy veins.”

— John Banville

16. “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

17. “No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.”

— John Banville

18. “What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.”

— John Banville

19. “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

20. “Happy sadness, sad happiness, the story of my life and loves.”

— John Banville

21. “The secret of survival is a defective imagination.”

— John Banville

22. “This is the mortal world. It is a world where nothing is lost, where all is accounted for while yet the mystery of things is preserved; a world where they may live, however briefly, however tenuously, in the failing evening of the self, solitary and at the same time together somehow here in this place, dying as they may be and yet fixed forever in a luminous, unending instant.”

— John Banville

23. “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

24. “I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking off desperately toward the horizon as if in mute search for a sign of rescue.”

— John Banville

25. “Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.”

— John Banville

26. “In my world, there are no simple questions, and precious few answers of any kind. If you are going to write about me, you must resign yourself to that.”

— John Banville

27. “To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.”

— John Banville

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

28. “We imagine that we remember things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past. That first death we witness will always be a murmur of voices down a corridor and a clock falling silent in the darkened room, the end of love is forever two spent cigarettes in a saucer and a white door closing.”

— John Banville

29. “The sentence is the great invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. I couldn’t ask for anything better. It’s as near to godliness as I can get.”

— John Banville

30. “The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.”

— John Banville

31. “We swam in sunshine and in rain; we swam in the morning, when the sea was sluggish as soup, we swam at night, the water flowing over our arms like undulations of black satin; one afternoon we stayed in the water during a thunderstorm, and a fork of lightning struck the surface of the sea so closer to us we heard the crackle of it and smelt the burnt air.”

— John Banville

32. “I don’t own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.”

— John Banville

33. “The past, I mean the real past, matters less than we pretend.”

— John Banville

34. “Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.”

— John Banville

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

35. “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

36. “And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world’s shrugs of indifference.”

— John Banville

37. “We erect a statue in our own image inside ourselves – idealised, you know, but still recognisable – and then spend our lives engaged in the effort to make ourselves into its likeness.”

— John Banville

38. “Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.”

— John Banville

39. “Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.”

— John Banville

40. “In the city of flesh I travel without maps, a worried tourist: and Ottilie was a very Venice. I stumbled lost in the blue shade of her pavements. Here was a dreamy stillness, a swaying, the splash of an oar. Then, when I least expected it, suddenly I stepped out into the great square, the sunlight, and she was a flock of birds scattering with soft cries in my arms.”

— John Banville

41. “Lately I had been finding it hard to understand the simplest things people said to me, as if what they were speaking in were a form of language I did not recognise; I would know the words but could not assemble them into sense.”

— John Banville

42. “When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it’s finished. A certain point comes at which you can’t do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence.”

— John Banville

43. “In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.”

— John Banville

44. “That’s one of the many things I hate about life, that it’s a hideously cliched business.”

— John Banville

45. “The world is always ready to be amazed, but the self, that lynx-eyed monitor, sees all the subterfuges, all the cut corners, and is not deceived.”

— John Banville

46. “Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things – new experiences, new emotions – and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self.”

— John Banville

47. “With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.”

— John Banville

48. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

49. “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

50. “Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.”

— John Banville