213 Quotes by John Banville

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

I 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.

We artists love to talk tough, but we're just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it.

The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.

In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.

I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.

I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.

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

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