John Banville Quotes

Disorder makes me feel at ease if I'm alone, embarrassed if I'm not.

I remember a night when I was living in Swindon on my own, and I couldn't sit on the couch because there were two cushions, and I couldn't sit equally between them.

That's my talent, I make people feel uneasy.

I don't like being left to my own thoughts.

I personally have a background of many days on end of confusion, understimulation, overstimulation, and uncomfortableness with the world around me.

I hate being alone, even for 10 minutes.

I'm almost completely without family and it's a very odd feeling in life. I have no children.

The most terrifying thing I can think of is being alone - and I mean utterly alone, like no one else in the world alone - at night. That's the nucleus of the first story in my collection and it's also where the title came from for the book.

I had a fear of being alone.

Don't go away. I don't want to be alone. I can't stand being alone.

Loneliness is about the scariest thing out there.

I am miserable when everything is in order and quiet. Seriously, it's hard for me when I can go home quietly, go to sleep, and get up in the morning without fear and tension.

From the time I was little, I always felt like an outsider. I always felt nervous and uncomfortable with myself.

No one to love, none to caress, Left all alone in this world's wilderness.

She didn't like to be alone. Even more, she didn't like being with people. (148)

A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul.

When she is alone in the rooms I hear her humming to keep herself from thinking.

Suddenly the world has run amok and left you alone and sane behind

Solitude is the mother of anxieties.

Looking about me, listening and recalling what the day had been like, I suddenly felt a secret unease in my heart and raised my eyes to the sky, but even in the sky there seemed to be no tranquillity. Dotted with stars, it constantly quivered and danced and shivered.

Leave me in the night but please don't leave me in the dark

Just being in a room with myself is almost more stimulation than I can bear.

I have never felt so lonely as on a golf course in the midst of a championship with thousands of people around, especially when things began to go wrong and the crowds started wandering away.

She had never before minded being alone. Now she dreaded it. When she was alone now she felt so dreadfully alone.

So lonely 'twas that God himself Scarce seemed there to be.