Top 100 John Banville Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 3

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

— John Banville

52. “It was a sumptuous, oh, truly sumptuous autumn day, all Byzantine coppers and golds under a Tiepolo sky of enamelled blue, the countryside all fixed and glassy, seeming not so much itself as its own reflection in the still surface of the lake. It was the kind of day on which, latterly, the sun for me is the world’s fat eye looking on in rich enjoyment as I writhe in misery.”

— John Banville

53. “I shall be delivered, like a noble closing speech. I shall be, in a word, said.”

— John Banville

54. “This, I told myself, this is the way I shall be condemned to pass my days, turning over words, stray lines, fragments of memory, to see what might be lurking underneath them, as if they were so many flat stones, while I steadily faded.”

— John Banville

55. “A married couple never seem so married as when viewed from the back seat of a motor car, talking quietly together in the front. Polly and Marcus might have been in their bedroom already, so soft and intimate their converse sounded to me, as I sat there alertly mute behind the backs of their heads.”

— John Banville

56. “All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.”

— John Banville

57. “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

58. “He had scores to settle with the world, and she, at that moment, was world enough for him.”

— John Banville

59. “Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.”

— John Banville

60. “Chaos is nothing but an infinite number of ordered things.”

— John Banville

61. “Remember what April was like when we were young, that sense of liquid rushing and the wind taking blue scoops out of the air and the birds beside themselves in the budding trees?”

— John Banville

62. “I am the worst judge of my books.”

— John Banville

63. “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

64. “I often ask myself whether my decision to pursue a life of scholarship – if decision is the right word – was a result of an essential poverty of the soul, or if the desiccation which I sometimes suspect is the one truly distinguishing mark of my scholarship was an inevitable consequence of that decision.”

— John Banville

65. “These things that were between us, these and a myriad others, a myriad myriad, these remain of her, but what will become of them when I am gone, I who am their repository and sole preserver?”

— John Banville

66. “Dogs are dim creatures, do not speak to me of their good sense – have you ever heard of a team of tomcats hauling a sled across the frozen wastes?”

— John Banville

67. “It has always seemed to me a disgrace that the embarrassments of early life should continue to smart throughout adulthood with undiminished intensity. Is it not enough that our youthful blunders made us cringe at the time, when we were at our tenderest, but must stay with us beyond cure, burn marks ready to flare up painfully at the merest touch? No: an indiscretion from earliest adolescence will still bring a blush to the cheek of the nonagenarian on his deathbed.”

— John Banville

68. “If that child dreaming by the wireless had been asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, what I had become was more or less what he would have described, in however halting a fashion, I am sure of it. This is remarkable, I think, even allowing for my present sorrows. Are not the majority of men disappointed with their lot, languishing in quiet desperation in their chains?”

— John Banville

69. “If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.”

— John Banville

70. “I don’t make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people.”

— John Banville

71. “I have this fantasy. I’m walking past a bookshop and I click my fingers and all my books go blank. So I can start again and get it right.”

— John Banville

72. “Still the dream persists, suppressed but always there, that somehow by some miraculous effort of the heart what was done could be undone. What form would such atonement take that would turn back time and bring the dead to life? None. None possible, not in the real world. And yet in my imaginings I can clearly see this cleansed new creature steaming up out of myself like a proselyte rising drenched from the baptismal river amid glad cries.”

— John Banville

73. “A plot begins when somebody has something to hide.”

— John Banville

74. “I marvelled, not for the first time, at the cruel complacency of ordinary things. But no, not cruel, not complacent, only indifferent, as how could they be otherwise? Henceforth, I would have to address things as they are, not as I imagine them, for this was a new version of reality.”

— John Banville

75. “What did I brood on, sitting there in the classic pose with my elbows on my knees and my chin on my hands? We do not need to go to the Greeks, our tragic predicament is written out on rolls of lavatory paper.”

— John Banville

76. “Do other people, remembering their parents, feel, as I do, a sense of having inadvertently done a small though significant, irreversible wrong?”

— John Banville

77. “The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.”

— John Banville

78. “He liked to bewilder his pupils, it was a form of tyranny.”

— John Banville

79. “There was a time when I quite liked what I saw in the looking-glass, but not anymore. Now I’m startled, and more than startled, by the visage that so abruptly appears there, never at all the one that I expect. I have been elbowed aside by a parody of myself, a sadly dishevelled figure in a Halloween mask made of sagging, pinkish- grey rubber that bears no more than a passing resemblance to the image of what I look like that I stubbornly retain in my head.”

— John Banville

80. “Inhabiting a place that could not be home, they were like actors compelled to play themselves.”

— John Banville

81. “I make my voyage out, far, far out, to the very brim, where a disc of water shimmers like molten coin against a coin-colored sky, and everything lifts, and sky and water merge invisibly. that is where I seem to the most at ease now, on the far, pale margin of things. If I can call it ease. If I can call it being.”

— John Banville

82. “The telephone ringing gave me a dreadful start. I have never got used to this machine, the way it crouches so malevolently, ready to start clamouring for attention when you least expect it, like a mad baby.”

— John Banville

83. “He knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minuscule absence, a barely detective gap in the so-called grand scheme, one unit fewer now. Or not even that, not even an empty space where he once was, for all will rush immediately to fill that vacuum. Pft. Gone. Recollections of him will remain in the minds of others for a while, but presently those others too will die and his few relics with them. And then all will be dark.”

— John Banville

84. “Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works.”

— John Banville

85. “I was always a distinct no-one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone.”

— John Banville

86. “Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.”

— John Banville

87. “If they give me the bloody prize, why can’t they say nice things about me?”

— John Banville

88. “At the seaside all is narrow horizontals, the world reduced to a few long straight lines pressed between earth and sky.”

— John Banville

89. “How deceptively light they are, the truly decisive steps we take in life.”

— John Banville

90. “He made the mistake of imagining that his possessions were a measure of his own worth, and strutted and crowed, parading his things like a schoolboy with a champion catapult.”

— John Banville

91. “How is it that in childhood everything new that caught my interest had an aura of the uncanny, since according to all the authorities the uncanny is not some new thing but a thing known returning in a different form, become a revenant?”

— John Banville

92. “We artists love to talk tough, but we’re just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it.”

— John Banville

93. “Belief is hard, and the abyss is always there, under one’s feet.”

— John Banville

94. “His years as a policeman had taught him to be not fearless, only to disregard the fact of being afraid.”

— John Banville

95. “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

96. “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. And incredulity, that too was a large part of being happy, I mean that euphoric inability fully to believe one’s simple luck.”

— John Banville

97. “And anyway, who’s to say that what we see when we’re drunk is not reality, and the sober world a bleared phantasmagoria.”

— John Banville

98. “How strange a thing it was to be here, animate and conscious, on this ball of mud and brine as it whirled through the illimitable depths of space.”

— John Banville

99. “I’m a priest for Christ’s sake – how can this be happening to me?”

— John Banville

100. “How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.”

— John Banville