John Banville Quotes
For me, a line has to sing before it does anything else. The great thrill is when a sentence that starts out being completely plain suddenly begins to sing, rising far above itself and above any expectation I might have had for it. That's what keeps me going on those dark December days when I think about how I could be living instead of writing.
Quotes to Explore
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The arts can play a vital role in revitalizing neighborhoods, using and improving vacant space, bringing new jobs and new sense of opportunity, and improving public safety by generating more foot traffic and more eyes on the street.
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My baby is amazing; even his head smells amazing. His breath, the whole thing, you could eat him! He's a big, beautiful boy. He's great.
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What are the relationships between power and knowledge? There are two bad, short answers: 1. Knowledge provides an instrument that those in power can wield for their own ends. 2. A new body of knowledge brings into being a new class of people or institutions that can exercise a new kind of power.
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As with lemon juice, the more sorrel you use, the more it has to be balanced with something sweet, starchy or creamy - it's a yin-yang approach to cooking that I find rather calming.
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Berlusconi is a genius in communication. Otherwise, he would never have become so rich.
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When I won the belt, it was kind of a precedent... The only Canadian to have ever held it.
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If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
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Few things parallel the bonding that occurs post-performance when congratulatory remarks are awarded, regrets are confessed, and gossip is exchanged.
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I think there's a karmic purpose that souls make before they decide to come into people's bodies and become someone's parent, or become someone's child. Maybe my dad disappearing was his way of giving me material with which to work, or a predisposition to feel heightened emotions.
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I've played a lot of elegance and refinement, so to do something really down and dirty is a great attraction.
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Acting was something I had to do.
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I auditioned in Chicago for Juilliard and didn't get in. I was basically living in a back room of my parents' house, paying rent and not doing anything with my life. I'd like to say it was patriotic to join the Marines, but it was also that I was doing nothing honorable with my life and spending too much time at McDonald's.
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Eventually, I decided that if I was going to really write a novel, I couldn't do it in New York City while holding down a job. You need a constant money source to live in New York City unless you're independently wealthy, which I'm not.
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The primary goal of management education was, as originally conceived, to impart knowledge that could be applied to a variety of real-world business situations.
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I gambled and I lost. I failed in securing my options for this choice for myself, but I succeeded in verifying the Dark Age is still with us.
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I've known Mark Hughes for half a lifetime. We joined Barcelona in the same summer of 1986, played together under Terry Venables and Luis Aragones, and have kept in touch ever since.
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I was a big fan of Middle Eastern elements of music and experimental electronic and tribal sounds.
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When you're young you don't think, 'This person is going to change your life.' But when you start recording your own songs, it comes back and reminds you.
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And at no point did making 'Brothers McMullen' feel like work or hardship. It was really just a matter of 11 days of fun over the course of 8 months.
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A man builds a house in England with the expectation of living in it and leaving it to his children; we shed our houses in America as easily as a snail does his shell.
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A major focus of 'Reality Hunger' is appropriation and plagiarism and what these terms mean. I can hardly treat the topic deeply without engaging in it. That would be like writing a book about lying and not being permitted to lie in it.
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The way Jacques Brel writes a story, getting into the character, bringing out all his faults and qualities in the same song.... Not that I could ever write in such an epic way, but it really is a different way to go about writing lyrics...and I find that quite inspiring.
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There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer's time isn't worth the paper he is not writing anything on.
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For me, a line has to sing before it does anything else. The great thrill is when a sentence that starts out being completely plain suddenly begins to sing, rising far above itself and above any expectation I might have had for it. That's what keeps me going on those dark December days when I think about how I could be living instead of writing.
