John Banville Self Quotations

I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.

I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.

I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.

Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self.

In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.