48+ John Banville Quotes On Sea, Order And Evidence

John Banville is an Irish novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for his Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea, as well as his other works such as The Book of Evidence and The Untouchable. His writing style is known for its lyrical, literary quality and his exploration of themes such as memory, identity, and mortality. Following is our collection on famous quotes by John Banville on love, life, sea.

Top 10 John Banville Quotes

1. Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.
2. All 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.
3. Everything we do is tinged with the knowledge that this may be the last time that we will do this, and that makes what we're doing incredibly sweet.
4. We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.
5. Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
6. The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.
7. With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.
8. How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.
9. Dogs are dim creatures, do not speak to me of their good sense--have you ever heard of a team of tomcats hauling a sled across the frozen wastes?
10. A plot begins when somebody has something to hide.

John Banville Short Quotes

• In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
• No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
• The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.
• If they give me the bloody prize, why can't they say nice things about me?
• ...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
• The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
• A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.
• Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
• What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it.
• The secret of survival is a defective imagination.

John Banville Quotes About Life

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

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

What 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 Banville

John Banville Famous Quotes And Sayings

Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self. — John Banville

There 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 Banville

The first thought that occurred to me, that night when I heard the chairman of the jury announce my name, was, Just think how many people hate me at this moment. Naturally, I wanted to annoy those people even further by being arrogant. — John Banville

I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking off desperately toward the horizon as if in mute search for a sign of rescue. — John Banville

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s devoted Beckett readers greeted each successively shorter volume from the master with a mixture of awe and apprehensiveness; it was like watching a great mathematician wielding an infinitesimal calculus, his equations approaching nearer and still nearer to the null point. — John Banville

I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self. — John Banville

Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart. — John Banville

Enormous morning, ponderous, meticulous; gray light streaking each bare branch, each single twig, along one side, making another tree, of glassy veins. — John Banville

I 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 Banville

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. — John Banville

These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses. It is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere. — John Banville

The trouble with you, Vic," he said, "is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in. — John Banville

Writing 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 Banville

In 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 Banville

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

Yes, 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

The telephone ringing gave me a dreadful start. I have never got used to this machine, the way it crouches so malevolently, ready to start clamouring for attention when you least expect it, like a mad baby. — John Banville

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 Banville

Poetry is that magic which consists in awakening sensations with the help of a combination of sounds ... that sorcery by which ideas are necessarily communicated to us, in a definite way, by words which nevertheless do not express them. — 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

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

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

I live in Dublin, God knows why. There are greatly more congenial places I could have settled in - Italy, France, Manhattan - but I like the climate here, and Irish light seems to be essential for me and for my writing. — John Banville

The past beats inside me like a second heart. — John Banville

All 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

Life Lessons by John Banville

1. John Banville's work emphasizes the importance of exploring the complexities of life and the human condition.
2. His novels often explore themes of identity, memory, and the past, showing that the truth is often more complicated than it appears.
3. By reading his work, we can learn to appreciate the nuances of life and to think more deeply about the world around us.