John Banville Art Quotations

I want my art to make people look at the world in a new way. I mean, what's the point of the art of writing if it doesn't take you into the mysterious?

Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.

All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself.

Poetry is that magic which consists in awakening sensations with the help of a combination of sounds ... that sorcery by which ideas are necessarily communicated to us, in a definite way, by words which nevertheless do not express them.

All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.