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 BanvilleDoing 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.
John BanvilleI 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 BanvilleSleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
John BanvilleYes, 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