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

• Somebody said something funny to me the other day. They said, 'Wolper, until two weeks ago, your tombstone was going to say, 'David Wolper, the man who produced 'Roots.' I think the tombstone now has a new inscription. It's going to be 'David Wolper, the man who produced the opening ceremony of the 1984 Olympics.'

  

  David L. Wolper
  • Funny
  • Tombstone

• Written on her tombstone: "I told you I was sick.

  

  Erma Bombeck
  • Sick
  • Tombstone

• I know it is one of the most important instruments and inventions, the electric guitar, to me, since television or movies or anything like that.

  

  John 5 LOSER
  • Important
  • Inventions
  • Electric Guitar

• It's like any other job: there's a method to it and it's really important to get that down. I'm still working on it, I got a lot to learn. It's one thing to make records but it's a whole 'nother capacity to be a star - whatever that is.

  

  Macy Gray
  • Important
  • Job
  • Star

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

  

  John Banville
  • Tombstone