John Banville Quotes

It's interesting if you can talk about the large moments and also the small moments to understand the deepest complexities of a man by trying to imagine who they are.

A man's true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.

The place you have to start to be any good at this, at acting, is with yourself. Everything is inside of you, all of it - the murderer, the great mother, the therapist, the husband. Everything is inside of us.

There are a lot of films where I play characters that are about the windows to the interior person rather than the exterior.

Are we to paint what's on the face, what's inside the face, or what's behind it?

My interest lies in my self-expression - what's inside of me - not what I'm in.

Since my subjects have always been my sensations, my states of mind and the profound reactions that life has been producing in me, I have frequently objectified all this in figures of myself, which were the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself.

I’ve always known that there’s more going on inside me than finds its way into the world, but this is probably true of everyone. Who doesn’t regret that he isn’t more fully understood?

Anything an artist does is to show ourselves as we really are, which is a complex thing. I don't think that one work of Philosophy or Art, or Letters, or Acting, or Middle Playing, or Tightrope Walking, or Flea Circuses has made mankind better, if by better you mean kinder, wiser, more tolerant of each other. One thing self knowledge. Knoticayton: know thyself.

your soul is an inner something that is another you and hardly anybody knows what it's really thinkin' except you.

You can never be more outside of you, than what's in you

I am convinced that any photographic attempt to show the complete man is nonsense. We can only show, as best we can, what the outer man reveals. The inner man is seldom revealed to anyone, sometimes not even the man himself.

There are two lives to each of us, the life of our actions, and the life of our minds and hearts. History reveals men's deeds and their outward characters, but not themselves. There is a secret self that has its own life, unpenetrated and unguessed.

Only hearts... They're in the inside of the inside of me.

The interior life is often stupid.

A mind might ponder its thought for an epoch, and not gain so much self-knowledge as the passion of love shall teach in a day.

Vocally, I really like going into the darker side of myself.

Film is about what you are thinking. It's about what's inside.

It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.

I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing…. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black.

The entire heavenly realm is within us, but to find it we have to relate to what's outside.

Herein lies the main objective of portraiture and also its main difficulty. The photographer probes for the innermost. The lens sees only the surface... .

Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.

I have no interest in problematizing things. So what I am writing to is that simple sense of being human in myself.

We must remember that knowledge of one’s own deep nature is also simultaneously knowledge of human nature in general.