213 Quotes by John Banville

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.

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

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

Let us say, the present is where we live, while the past is where we dream.

Time and age have brought not wisdom, as they are supposed to do, but confusion, and a broadening incomprehension, each year laying down another ring of nesience.

What did I brood on, sitting there in the classic pose with my elbows on my knees and my chin on my hands? We do not need to go to the Greeks, our tragic predicament is written out on rolls of lavatory paper.

I think I am becoming my own ghost.

A man is not much if he can’t depend on himself, and nothing if others can’t depend on him.

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. And incredulity, that too was a large part of being happy, I mean that euphoric inability fully to believe one’s simple luck.