213 Quotes by John Banville

I’m a priest for Christ’s sake – how can this be happening to me?

I’m full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.

Remember what April was like when we were young, that sense of liquid rushing and the wind taking blue scoops out of the air and the birds beside themselves in the budding trees?

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

Do other people, remembering their parents, feel, as I do, a sense of having inadvertently done a small though significant, irreversible wrong?

A married couple never seem so married as when viewed from the back seat of a motor car, talking quietly together in the front. Polly and Marcus might have been in their bedroom already, so soft and intimate their converse sounded to me, as I sat there alertly mute behind the backs of their heads.

What is my purpose here? I may say, I just sat down to write, but I am not deceived. I have never done anything in my life that did not have a purpose, usually hidden, sometimes even from myself.

We do not grow up; all we do is grow dull.

Inhabiting a place that could not be home, they were like actors compelled to play themselves.