John Banville Quotes

Interviewer: What would you like carved onto your tombstone? Banville: I'd rather not have a tombstone.

John Banville

• Tombstone

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Quotes to Explore

• Only weeks after Oslo began, when nearly all the world and most of Israel was drunk with the idea of peace, I argued that a Palestinian society not constrained by democratic norms would be a fear society that would pose a grave threat to Israel.

  

  Natan Sharansky
  • World
  • Society
  • Fear

• Certainly, hunger can bring out the worst in us. But it can also bring out the best.

  

  Hamza Yusuf
  • Best
  • Worst
  • Hunger

• Maybe it's just my own chronic morbidity and melancholia, but I really do think about it a great deal and quite often in the small hours of the night when, it is said, the greatest numbers of people die.

  

  Brian Sibley
  • People
  • Great
  • Night

• Somehow it's O.K. for people to chuckle about not being good at math. Yet if I said, 'I never learned to read,' they'd say I was an illiterate dolt.

  

  Neil deGrasse Tyson
  • People
  • Good
  • Math

• This will sound really funny, but I'm so used to shooting in Hindi that shooting in English took a while to get used to.

  Jacqueline Fernandez
  • Funny
  • English

• In State of the Union addresses, I always look at the foreign policy and military parts first, which are generally pretty minimal.

  

  Phil Klay
  • Pretty
  • Military

• Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.

  

  Epictetus
  • Great

• The future begins today! What is important is what we do today and tomorrow for Tunisia and all its children. We must work hand in hand.

  

  Beji Caid Essebsi
  • Work
  • Important
  • Children

• People want to work with somebody who feels shame, who worries about the perceptions of others. Dishonesty is something we don't like in others.

  

  Frans de Waal
  • People
  • Work

• Every day is a blessing in WWE, and I keep reminding myself of that. That's my character.

  

  Jinder Mahal
  • Character

• To me, music is a river. I have lived my life beside the river. Every day, I get up and look at the river. I watch it and notice when it rises and falls.

  

  Clarence Clemons
  • Life
  • Up
  • Music

• When you begin a play, you're going to have to spend a lot of time with those characters, so those characters are going to have to be rich enough that you want to take a very long journey with them. That's how I begin thinking about what I want to write about and who I want to write about.

  

  Lynn Nottage
  • Time
  • Thinking
  • Long

• I got hit a lot. I'm glad I lived through it.

  

  Leon Spinks

• I mean the cool thing about the movies is that you get to try on these different personalities and different styles.

  

  Edward Burns
  • Different
  • Cool

• What moves me most is style: the quality of the writing rather than the story being told.

  

  Jim Harrison
  • Writing
  • Style
  • Quality

• Texts and e-mails travel no faster than phone calls and telegrams, and their content isn't necessarily richer or poorer.

  

  Alison Gopnik
  • Travel

• Like most parents, I think, my children have been the source of some of my most intense joys and despairs, my deepest moral dilemmas and greatest moral achievements.

  

  Alison Gopnik
  • Children
  • Parents
  • Moral

• Gratitude is what we radiate when we experience grace, and the soul was made to run on grace the way a 747 runs on rocket fuel.

  

  John Ortberg
  • Experience
  • Soul
  • Gratitude

• I used to want the words 'She tried' on my tombstone. Now I want 'She did it.'

  

  Katherine Dunham
  • She
  • Words
  • Tombstone

• Many years ago I sent an old, beloved jacket to a cleaner, the Sycamore Cleaners. It was a leather jacket covered in Guinness and blood and marmalade, one of those jobs... and it came back with a little note pinned to it, and on the note it said, 'It distresses us to return work which is not perfect.' So that will do for me. That can go on my tombstone.

  

  Peter O'Toole
  • Perfect
  • Blood
  • Beloved

• My sister's a singer, and she's on Twitter, and she has millions of followers. I wonder how that helps her. I think it does to an extent. I think she gets free things.

  

  Hannah Ware
  • She
  • Free
  • Wonder

• D'euls deus fu il tut autresiCume del chevrefoil esteitKi a la codre se perneit:Quant il s'i est laciez e prisEnsemble poënt bien durer;Mes ki puis les volt deservrer,Li codres muert hastivementE li chevrefoil ensement.'Bele amie, si est de nus:Ne vus sanz mei, ne mei sanz vus!'

  

  Marie de France

• Part of the story of 'Ghosts of Ascalon' is how they got to that tentative truce where you can find humans and charr working together.

  

  Jeff Grubb
  • Together

• Interviewer: What would you like carved onto your tombstone? Banville: I'd rather not have a tombstone.

  

  John Banville
  • Tombstone