All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
John BanvilleThere 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 BanvilleMost crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.
John BanvilleSleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
John BanvilleA man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.
John BanvilleAll 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