213 Quotes by John Banville

The effect of prizes on one's career - if that is what to call it - is considerable, since they give one more clout with publishers and more notoriety among journalists. The effect on one's writing, however, is nil - otherwise, one would be in deep trouble.

...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Happy sadness, sad happiness, the story of my life and loves.