John Banville Quotes

God does not believe in our God.

I believe more and more that God must not be judged on this earth. It is one of His sketches that has turned out badly.

It’s not God that I do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God’s, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept.

If God made the world, I would not be that God, for the misery of the world would break my heart.

In my rational mind, I know... that is a very simplistic way of looking at it, but when there is violence of that kind, it challenges my faith. I still can't say that I totally understand why - why that is allowed to happen.

I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't.

Some people turn from God because they cannot understand how a good God can permit evil in the world.

I would say that I am a poor Christian; I'm not a believer. It was this idea very early in my life that life on Earth, nature or man could not be a creation of a merciful God.

I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world.

If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.

For moral reasons I am an atheist - for moral reasons. I am of the opinion that you would recognize a creator by his creation, and the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created by anyone than to think that somebody created this intentionally.

Do I have no soul as punishment for not believing in the soul?

If God is all good, then He is not all powerful. If God is all powerful, then He is not all good. I am a disbeliever is the omnipotence of God because of the Holocaust. But for 35 years, I have been believing that He is doing the best he can.

Some of the men spoke of God: His mysterious ways, the sins of the Jewish people, and the redemption to come. As for me, I had ceased to pray. I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice.

But I don't understand God. I don't understand how he could see the way people treat one another, and not chalk up the whole human race as a bad idea.

In the face of all that is so wrong with the world, the very worst thing you can do is survive. And yet you must survive. It is this dilemma that makes us believe and cling to the lie that we have a soul, and that there is a God who cares about its fate.

It seems to me that one of the most interesting things about God as a concept, if you decide to believe in God, is that God's ways are unknowable. And God obviously, look at the world around you, does or is responsible for some terrible, terrible, awful things. A young girl kidnapped and kept in the darkness and sexually abused. The deaths of six million Jews. A mudslide that buries a village. All of these things. If God is doing the good stuff, he's got to be doing that stuff too.

If God is God He is not good, if God is good He is not God; take the even, take the odd.

I'm an agnostic. Sometimes I muse deeply on the forces that are for me invisible. When I am almost close to the idea of God, I feel immediately estranged by the horrors of this world, which he seems to tolerate.

To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life. To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.

I don't want a God that would go around killing people's little girls. Neither do I want a God who would kill his own son.

Why is God making me suffer so much? Just because I don't believe in him?

What sort of god would deliberately create a world in which his creatures must eat one another to live?

If that god is described as being all-powerful and all-knowing and all-good, I don't see evidence for it anywhere in the world. So I remain unconvinced. If that god is all-powerful and all-good, I don't see that when a tsunami kills a quarter-million or an earthquake kills a quarter-million people. I'd like to think of good as something in the interest of your health or longevity.