Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.
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 BanvilleAll 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 BanvilleIn my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.
John BanvilleIn 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 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 never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
John BanvilleWriting keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one's living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest 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 BanvilleIf I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
John BanvilleSleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
John BanvilleI've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
John BanvilleTo take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.
John BanvilleI 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 BanvilleWhat 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 BanvilleAnd indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
John BanvilleAll art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
John BanvilleIan McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.
John BanvilleGiven the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
John BanvilleWhen 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 BanvilleYou will remember this when all else fades, this moment, here, together, by this well. There will be certain days, and certain nights, you’ll feel my presence near you, hear my voice. You’ll think you have imagined it and yet, inside you, you will catch an answering cry. On April evenings, when the rain has ceased, your heart will shake, you’ll weep for nothing, pine for what’s not there. For you, this life will never be enough, there will forever be an emptiness, where once the god was all in all in you.
John Banville