“I am essentially a religious type. In my teens I gave up Catholicism, and at the same time I started writing. Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one's living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. I couldn't ask for anything better. It's as near to godliness as I can get.”

— John Banville

John Banville, The Art of Fiction No. 200 (2009)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 14, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I am essentially a religious type. In my teens I gave up Catholicism, and at the same time I started writing. Writing k…" by John Banville?

John Banville 97

Irish writer 1945

Related quotes

“It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence—no first draft. I can’t write five words but that I change seven.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Interview, The Paris Review (Summer 1956)

“I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again…”

Philip Roth (1933–2018) American novelist

Source: Ghost Writer

“My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

“I try to write every day. I used to try to write four times a day, minimum of three sentences each time. It doesn't sound like much but it's kinda like the hare and the tortoise. If you try that several times a day you're going to do more than three sentences, one of them is going to catch on. You're going to say "Oh boy!"”

Roger Zelazny (1937–1995) American speculative fiction writer

and then you just write. You fill up the page and the next page. But you have a certain minimum so that at the end of the day, you can say "Hey I wrote four times today, three sentences, a dozen sentences. Each sentence is maybe twenty word long. That's 240 words which is a page of copy, so at least I didn't goof off completely today. I got a page for my efforts and tomorrow it might be easier because I've moved as far as I have".
Phlogiston interview (1995)

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

Source: A Moveable Feast (1964), Ch. 2
Context: I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know."