John Banville Short Quotes

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Ambiguity is the essence of Irish writing, I think.

John Banville
Every artist has a Dorian Gray slaving away in the attic.

John Banville
Summoned, one shuffles guiltily into the department of trivia.

John Banville
The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.

John Banville
Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.

John Banville
Oh, I'm terribly ignorant of Czech literature. It's disgraceful really.

John Banville
If they give me the bloody prize, why can't they say nice things about me?

John Banville
What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it.

John Banville
Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.

John Banville
I like to hide in Ireland, but I like to think of myself as an internal exile.

John Banville
I'm doing my best to not be too rude about it, but oh my God that Czech food...

John Banville
One must try to keep a sensible perspective and not take oneself too seriously.

John Banville
I'm a little older now and I think I've lightened up a bit as I'm getting older.

John Banville
Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.

John Banville
Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.

John Banville
Wodehouse is very interesting. There must be all kinds of darknesses in that man's life.

John Banville
We writers are shy, nocturnal creatures. Push us into the light and the light blinds us.

John Banville
There is something slightly sinister about Prague, just as there is about Lyon and Turin.

John Banville
To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.

John Banville
Let's not despise story-telling. Like all novelists, I have this low desire to tell people stories.

John Banville
I like to dress conservatively because then the outrageous things you say are even more outrageous.

John Banville
Come, Benjamin, put your arm around me and we shall be comfortably one, mon semblable—mon frère!

John Banville
Interviewer: What would you like carved onto your tombstone?
Banville: I'd rather not have a tombstone.

John Banville
March in Ireland can be a very lovely month, if you like your air rain-washed and your light wind-shaken.

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

John Banville
And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.

John Banville
I don't know what citizens of Prague must feel about these endless lines of tourists tramping over their streets.

John Banville
We all yearn in our hearts to be Larkin's "shit in the shuttered chateau", but few of us achieve that grand apotheosis.

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

John Banville
Copernicus stuck very closely to the facts, but in Kepler I invented freely, and it's a much better book because of that.

John Banville