Top 55 Quotes by John Banville

We artists love to talk tough, but we're just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it.

I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

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

Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.

I don't 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, it's very difficult to find.

I don't make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people.

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.

We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.

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