William John Banville is an Irish novelist, short story writer, adapter of dramas and screenwriter. Though he has been described as “the heir to Proust, via Nabokov”, Banville himself maintains that W. B. Yeats and Henry James are the two real influences on his work. Banville has won the 1976 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the 2005 Booker Prize, the 2011 Franz Kafka Prize, the 2013 Austrian State Prize for European Literature and the 2014 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007, Italy made him a Cavaliere of the Ordine della Stella d’Italia (essentially a knighthood) in 2017. He is a former member of Aosdána, having voluntarily relinquished the financial stipend in 2001 to another, more impoverished, writer. May these John Banville Quotes On Success inspire you to take action so that you may live your dreams.
1. “In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.” John Banville
2. “I think I’m less the writer than I’m the written.” John Banville
3. “A plot begins when somebody has something to hide.” John Banville
4. “I never went to university. I’m self-educated. I didn’t go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.” John Banville
5. “And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world’s shrugs of indifference.” John Banville
6. “Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.” John Banville
7. “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.” John Banville
8. “What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it.” John Banville
9. “To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.” John Banville
10. “The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.” John Banville
11. “I do not 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
12. “That’s one of the many things I hate about life, that it’s a hideously cliched business.” John Banville
13. “If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.” John Banville
14. “I’ve always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.” John Banville
15. “I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist.” John Banville
16. “Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one’s living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. I couldn’t ask for anything better. It’s as near to godliness as I can get.” John Banville
17. “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
18. “In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.” John Banville
19. “We think we’re living in the present, but we’re really living in the past.” John Banville
20. “The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.” John Banville
21. “I don’t make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people.” John Banville
22. “Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh, they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.” John Banville
23. “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
24. “We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.” John Banville
25. “A man is not much if he can’t depend on himself, and nothing if others can’t depend on him.” John Banville
26. “Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.” John Banville
27. “There are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I know seems to have fallen out of my mind like a shower of rain, and I am gripped for a moment in paralysed dismay, waiting for it all to come back but with no certainty that it will.” John Banville
28. “The past beats inside me like a second heart.” John Banville
29. “How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.” John Banville
30. “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.” John Banville
31. “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
32. “For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.” John Banville
33. “Life is tragic but it’s equally comic.” John Banville
34. “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
35. “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.” John Banville
I hope you enjoyed these John Banville Quotes On Success. Do let us know which one was your favorite in the comments section below.
My Name is Md. Mustafizur Rahman Mehedi, I am the CEO of "Islamic Stock Library" youtube channel. I am a Bangaldeshi new entrepreneur. My goal is to help people and remove all kind of money problem from society.
