John Banville: Trending quotes

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John Banville: 194 quotes0 likes

“I feel that over the past 15 years, there has been a steady move toward more populist work. I do feel - and of course I'm completely biased - that this year was a return to the better days of the 80s and early 90s. It was a very good short list and a decent jury; it didn't have any stand-up comedians or media celebs on it, and I think that's what the Man Booker prize should be. There are plenty of other rewards for middle-brow fiction. There should be one decent prize for [pause] real books.”

14th time lucky (2005)

“Certain moments remain in the mind with such force and clearness that one suspects they must be invented; that they are not held in the memory but generated out of the imagination.”

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

“My present study - a word that always makes me uneasy, I am not sure why - is a small apartment in a huge, anonymous, quadrilateral block in Dublin city centre. My window, the one I do not look out of, gives on to a courtyard where no one ever goes, and where the silence is day-long and almost pastoral. When I first began to come here to work, a dozen years ago, I used to shut my door on entering each morning and put the chain on. The place is clean, or cleanish, and, yes, well lighted. Here I am unassailable. Or so I like to imagine.”

Writers' rooms: John Banville (2007)

“I drive from home to my office, a small apartment on the river in the center of Dublin. I write there from 9 a. m. to lunchtime, I take a simple lunch—bread, cheese, nice cup of tea—work until 6 p. m., then home for dinner. Viewed from outside my head it is a singularly dull and uneventful day, but inside my head … aaah.”

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

“I could have kept [writing "Irish" novels such as Birchwood] and probably had a good deal more success than I did, especially on this side of the Atlantic. But you have to try to do many things. You have to try to do things that you actually think you're incapable of.”

Once More Admired Than Bought, A Writer Finally Basks in Success (1990)

“One must try to keep a sensible perspective and not take oneself too seriously.”

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

“Ambiguity is the essence of Irish writing, I think.”

Oblique dreamer (2000)

“Wodehouse is very interesting. There must be all kinds of darknesses in that man's life.”

Oblique dreamer (2000)

“[On The Sea being filmed] It's not a blockbuster and it's not going to earn half a billion in the first weekend, but it's a work of art and I'm very pleased with it.”

John Banville: Who cares whodunnit? (2013)

“If they give me the bloody prize, why can't they say nice things about me?”

John Banville http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/10/johnbanville?INTCMP=SRCH, The Guardian (22 July 2008).

“I'm also lumbered with the title of being a writer's writer, which is the worst possible reputation you can have, because, of course, other writers don't read other writers except to gain evidence against them. And it puts readers off.”

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

“I don't see why the young in Prague or Budapest or Warsaw shouldn't be allowed to go to hell in a handcart if they want to. They do it everywhere else and they have great fun doing so.”

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

“The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.”

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, The Art of Fiction No. 200 (2009)

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

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, 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 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.”

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.”

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: Who cares whodunnit? (2013)