John Banville Quotes

Dogs are the only mammals that will actually stare and look into a human's eyes.

Of the seven experiments, the ones that have been most investigated so far have been the pets. The dogs who know when their masters for coming home, and the sense of being stared at.

Dogs are born knowing exactly what they want to do: eat, scratch, roll in disgusting stuff, sniff and squabble with other dogs, roam, sleep, have sex. Little of this is what we want them to do, of course. We ask them to sit, stay, smell peasant, practice abstinence, and be accommodating.

Dogs do not grasp the concept of house cleaning.

It is my experience that in some areas [my poodle] Charley is more intelligent that I am, but in others he is abysmally ignorant. He can't read, can't drive a car, and has no grasp of mathematics. But in his own field of endeavor, which he is now practicing, the slow, imperial smelling over and anointing on an area, he has no peer. Of course his horizons are limited, but how wide are mine?

The cat will mew, and dog will have his day.

Sometimes you're sure dogs have some secret, superior intelligence, and other times you know they're only their simple, goofy selves.

Animals are a continuous source of inspiration and wonder to me. I would love to play a dog.

Cats are impossible to work with. They're just very difficult because you can't really train them. They're not really interested in whatever you want them to do. Dogs want to please you; cats only want to please themselves.

Dogs do have feelings, I gather.

A dog is a vehicle, you know; a dog is a window to Mother Nature, and that's the closest species we have.

My dog has the intellectual capacity of a lime wedge, yet even he possesses an elaborate set of assumptions, based on his ability to control my behavior through a combination of slavish devotion and incessant howling.

Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat.

Dogs are a window on the natural world.

Cats and dogs are a very good window into the natural world: a chance to see how another species lives and deals with its problems, what they like and what they don't like.

I treat my cat like she's my therapist or something, because I talk to her all the time, and as she's gotten older, she talks back. It's pretty funny.

A new report says that dogs can sniff out prostate cancer with almost 98 percent accuracy. The report also finds that cats can sniff it out with 100 percent accuracy but they prefer to watch you die.

We have always had dogs, and they have faithfully performed many valuable services for us, such as: 1. Peeing on everything. 2. When we're driving in our car, alerting us that we have passed another dog by barking real loud in our ears for the next 114 miles. 3. Trying to kill the Avon lady.

Never have a dog. Let's not beat around the bush here: dogs are morons.

Marvelous as may be the power of my dog to understand my moods, deathless as his affection and fidelity, his mental state is as unsolved a mystery to me as it was to my remotest ancestor.

Reason number 106 why dogs are smarter than humans: once you leave the litter, you server contact with your mothers.

All dogs seem to be great linguists, according to their owners. They always understand every word that's said to them.

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.

A dog will flatter you but you have to flatter the cat.

Dalmatians are not only superior to other dogs, they are like all dogs, infinitely less stupid than men.