John Banville Quotes

That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business.

No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.

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

We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.

When 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.

I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.

I don't make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people.

I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.

You know, artists don't really have all that much experience of life. We make a huge amount out of the small experience that we do have.

There is something about gin, the tang in it of the deep wildwood, perhaps, that always makes me think of twilight and mists and dead maidens. Tonight it tinkled in my mouth like secret laughter.

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

The dead are my dark matter, filling up impalpably the empty spaces of the world.

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