Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don't do well, in the hope of learning. John Banville More Quotes by John Banville More Quotes From John Banville All one wants to do is make a small, finished, polished, burnished, beautiful object . . . I mean, that's all one wants to do. One has nothing to say about the world, or society, or morals or politics or anything else. One just wants to get the damn thing done, you know? Kafka had it right when he said that the artist is the man who has nothing to say. It's true. You get the thing done, but you don't actually have anything to communicate, apart from the object itself. John Banville artist beautiful mean When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it's finished. A certain point comes at which you can't do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence. John Banville sentences certain labor 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. John Banville poetry ideas art The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language. John Banville language real world Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand. John Banville hands The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization. John Banville invention crafts civilization The secret of survival is a defective imagination. John Banville survival imagination secret These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses. It is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere. John Banville mean way world What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it. John Banville sufficiency I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking off desperately toward the horizon as if in mute search for a sign of rescue. John Banville horizon land littles I have never really got used to being on this earth. Sometimes I think our presence here is due to a cosmic blunder, that we were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and other, grimmer skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, off on the far side of the galaxy, whirling and whirling. And the ones who were meant for here, are they out there, baffled and homesick, like us? No, they would have become extinct long ago. How could they survive, these gentle earthlings, in a world that was made to contain us. John Banville long-ago law thinking A plot begins when somebody has something to hide. John Banville plot writing Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead. John Banville rehearsal dresses sleep I dont know if there is a personal identity. We all imagine that we are absolute individuals. But when we begin to look for where this individuality resides, its very difficult to find. John Banville individuality identity looks 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. John Banville fantasy book past 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. John Banville toffee soul self What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean. John Banville ocean grief weight Why does the past seem so magical, so fraught, so luminous? At the time it was just, ugh, another boring bloody day. But, to look back on, it's a day full of miracles and light and extraordinary events. Why is this? What process do we apply to the past, to give it this vividness? I don't know. John Banville day look light time With crime fiction, you have to write a half-dozen before they catch on. John Banville write you crime fiction I know some of my memories are made up and they are far more powerful than the things that actually happened. For example, I always remember my brother posting me a copy of 'Dubliners' from Africa, but he says he never did. John Banville me brother remember memories
