213 Quotes by John Banville

And anyway, who’s to say that what we see when we’re drunk is not reality, and the sober world a bleared phantasmagoria.

Lots of water under that bridge, let’s not drown ourselves in it.

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.

Chaos is nothing but an infinite number of ordered things.

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.

In my world, there are no simple questions, and precious few answers of any kind. If you are going to write about me, you must resign yourself to that.

He liked to bewilder his pupils, it was a form of tyranny.

This is the mortal world. It is a world where nothing is lost, where all is accounted for while yet the mystery of things is preserved; a world where they may live, however briefly, however tenuously, in the failing evening of the self, solitary and at the same time together somehow here in this place, dying as they may be and yet fixed forever in a luminous, unending instant.

If that child dreaming by the wireless had been asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, what I had become was more or less what he would have described, in however halting a fashion, I am sure of it. This is remarkable, I think, even allowing for my present sorrows. Are not the majority of men disappointed with their lot, languishing in quiet desperation in their chains?