John Banville Quotes

I like Nietzsche. I quote him in many of my books. He was born 100 years before me.

Nietzche . . . he was a confirmed Life Force worshipper. It was he who raked up the Superman, who is as old as Prometheus; and the 20th century will run after this newest of the old crazes when it gets tired of the world, the flesh, and your humble servant.

Friedrich Nietzsche--the prophet of restless young men everywhere

A daily dose of Nietzsche goes a long way.

You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.

The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't.

Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.

I became the stage for the great argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. I was the extra ready to take on all the roles.

Mann was profoundly influenced by two philosophers, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who returned to the most ancient of all philosophical questions - "How to live?" - and whose writings offered novel perspectives for considering that question (much more perspective-offering than rigorous argument!)

The Gay Science, section 108

This world is the will to power and nothing besides!

Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.

They didn't teach Nietzsche in the philosophy department at Harvard; philosophy there was strictly analytical stuff and the poetic ramblings of Nietzsche did not belong. And see - you are teaching it in a literature class - so they must have been right.

Nietzsche ... has caused [philosophers] so much confusion.

God is dead, but considering the state the species man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown.

Our drives are reducible to the will to power. The will to power is the ultimate fact at which we arrive.

Nietzsche was so intelligent and advanced. And that's how I am. I'm the black, basketball-playing Nietzsche.

Probably the only way Woody Allen and I are similar is that he has a lot to say about Nietzsche.

I read Gide's 'The Immoralist' over and over as a teenager. I was obsessed with it. It's written with such simplicity and dread, and the desert, the shabby colonial world, is brought right into your consciousness without being over-explained.

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman-a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting

Master-morality and Slave-morality.

If you put into one room everyone who considered themselves a Nietzschean, there would be a bloodbath.

[Friedrich] Nietzsche said something marvellous, he said "Madness is not a consequence of uncertainty but of certainty", and this is fanaticism.

Nietzsche's my favorite. He's just insane.

I read a book lately by Nietzsche and he says religion is just to dull the senses of the people. I agree.