John Banville Quotes (97 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

The opening line of a juvenile and "dreadful imitation" of Joyce's Dubliners - John Banville http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/10/johnbanville?INTCMP=SRCH, The Guardian (22 July 2008).

“Art is like sex: when you're doing it, nothing else matters. Away from his desk the novelist can care deeply about the social, political, moral aspects of what he is writing but when he sits down to write, all those concerns fall away and nothing matters except the putting down of one carefully chosen word after another carefully chosen word, until a sentence is finished, then a paragraph, then a page, then a chapter, then a book. When I'm working I don't care about anything, not even myself. All my concentration is directed towards the making of the thing on the page. The rest is just stuff — even though it is the stuff of life.”

John Banville

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

“Summoned, one shuffles guiltily into the department of trivia.”

John Banville

14th time lucky (2005)

“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)

“Come, Benjamin, put your arm around me and we shall be comfortably one, mon semblable—mon frère!”

John Banville

John Banville on the birth of his dark twin, Benjamin Black (2011)

“I would have failed, of course, but failure is the condition of the artist's life. What kind of failure would I have enjoyed, suffered? I know it was not all waste. My hopeless daubings taught me to look at the world with a painter's eye, despite the poor connection between eye and hand. And the smells of turpentine and linseed oil and paint-soaked rags still make my blood tingle. But words were my calling, and called to me, and I let fall the brush.”

John Banville

My other life: John Banville http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/30/my-other-life-john-banville?INTCMP=SRCH, The Observer (30 November 2008).

“When young writers approach me for advice, I remind them, as gently as I can, that they are on their own, with no help available anywhere.”

John Banville

How I Write: John Banville on ‘Ancient Light,’ Nabokov, and Dublin (2012)

“I always thought when I got older that I'd be jealous of my children but I'm not. It's the opposite. I love seeing their possibilities. Nothing makes me as happy as sitting at dinner with loved ones, having a glass of wine with a meal that I've cooked. What could be better?”

John Banville

John Banville: Who cares whodunnit? (2013)

“I know that this is a cliché by now and I suppose that Prague people are sick and tired of hearing Prague referred to as ‘Magic Prague’, but, you know, I may complain about the tourists, but I am a tourist after all. I'd rather not be, but I am.”

John Banville

John Banville: claiming Kafka as an Irish writer (2011)

“I suppose this is peasant food. You know, the workers in the fields needed these heavy dumplings and things to eat, but God don't offer them to me…”

John Banville

John Banville: Using words to paint pictures of "magical" Prague (2006)

“Saramago is … interesting, but I don't think I would put it higher than that … [he] ventures too far into the realm of 'magic realism' for my taste. Reality itself is magical enough without inventing whimsicalities.”

John Banville

Quote from The militant magician http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/dec/28/featuresreviews.guardianreview11?INTCMP=SRCH, The Guardian (28 December 2002).

“Every novelist knows – perhaps everyone knows who has written even a letter, or a page of a diary – that the process of composition involves two separate sensibilities.”

John Banville

John Banville on the birth of his dark twin, Benjamin Black (2011)

“I'm very much against the notion of the Great Man, the Great Figure who is telling us all how to behave. Writers are just like other people, except slightly more obsessed.”

John Banville

14th time lucky (2005)

“I write in what we call Hiberno-English, and it would be disastrous to lose my literary accent, as both Joyce and Beckett began to do in exile. In their case the unique tone of voice they each unwittingly adopted only made for a deeper poetic intensity; I suspect if I were to undergo a similar loss the result would not be so productive.”

John Banville

How I Write: John Banville on ‘Ancient Light,’ Nabokov, and Dublin (2012)

“A work of art is not about something, it is something, in the same way that life is not something that has meaning, only significance. And art's intentions are entirely innocent – no comment, no opinion, no attempted coercion. All – all! – art attempts to do is to quicken the sense of life, to make vivid for the reader the mysterious predicament of being alive for a brief span in this exquisite and terrible world.”

John Banville

Fully Booked: Q & A with John Banville (2012)

“Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces—brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc. — are hinged together with the subtlety of a child's Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy. The politics of the book is banal, of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party, before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew. There are good things here, for instance the scene when Perowne visits his senile mother in an old-folks' home, in which the writing is genuinely affecting in its simplicity and empathetic force. Overall, however, Saturday has the feel of a neoliberal polemic gone badly wrong; if Tony Blair — who makes a fleeting personal appearance in the book, oozing insincerity — were to appoint a committee to produce a "novel for our time," the result would surely be something like this.”

John Banville

Banville on Saturday http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2005/05/banville_on_sat.html, from The New York Review of Books (source dated 10 May 2005). Original source http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2005/may/26/a-day-in-the-life/?pagination=false.

“Oh, I'm terribly ignorant of Czech literature. It's disgraceful really.”

John Banville

John Banville: Using words to paint pictures of "magical" Prague (2006)

“But trying to be a painter did teach me to look at the world in a very particular way—looking very closely at things, at colors, at how things form themselves in space — and I've always been grateful for that. You have all this space, and you have a figure: what do you do with it? And in a way that’s what all art is. How do we find a place for our creatures, or inventions, in this incoherent space into which we’re thrown?”

John Banville

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

“[T]he older I get the more I realise that the world is not as varied as we thought it was when we were young. Most places are much alike.”

John Banville

John Banville: Using words to paint pictures of "magical" Prague (2006)

“Interviewer: What would you like carved onto your tombstone? Banville: I'd rather not have a tombstone.”

John Banville

How I Write: John Banville on ‘Ancient Light,’ Nabokov, and Dublin (2012)