John Banville: Trending quotes

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John Banville: 194 quotes0 likes

“Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don't do well, in the hope of learning.”

John Banville

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

“They filmed it down in Wexford and I visited the set for about half an hour. I don't usually go near the set, because there's nothing for a writer to do there and you're constantly getting in the way. If I give a book to the movies, it's theirs. Writers often whinge about being betrayed by the movies – I have no sympathy for that. If you don't want a movie to be made, then don't sell your book to the movies.”

John Banville

John Banville: Who cares whodunnit? (2013)

“I'm a little surprised that commercial success has arrived. I used to think that it was hopeless, that it would never happen.”

John Banville

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

“[On book reviewing] I will only turn down a book if I know I won't be able to muster enough interest to read the bloody thing. Or if I realize that I despise the author, and that I'm just going to become hysterical in my dispraise. A couple of times in my life I've disobeyed my own rule, and later regretted it. […] It's a delicate business. All too often, if one writes a favorable notice, it's seen as a product of the old-boy network, and if one dispraises a book, it's seen as envy. Nobody seems able to accept that I review books as a book reviewer, not as a competing novelist. When I review, I'm being as honest as I can. And I'm saying to the reading public — the minuscule segment of the reading public that reads reviews — that this is my judgment.”

John Banville

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

“When I stand up from my writing desk, "John Banville", or "Benjamin Black" – that is, the one whose name will appear on the title page – vanishes on the instant, since he only existed while the writing was being done.”

John Banville

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

“So vivid is my recollection of the birth of Benjamin Black that surely, I feel, a cunning artificer has been at work, fashioning a surreally realistic picture of something that happened quite differently from what I seem to remember. Consider that light falling on the sea, how effulgent and steady it is; consider the trees, improbably full-leafed for the time of year – and look at those birds! Has Madam Memory really such a piercing eye for detail, are her powers of recall so comprehensive?”

John Banville

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

“March in Ireland can be a very lovely month, if you like your air rain-washed and your light wind-shaken.”

John Banville

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

“T. S. Eliot said it is no business of the artist to think. I presume he meant it's only the business of the artist to feel, but I like the notion of there being a mind behind the fiction that I read and that I write.”

John Banville

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

“There is something slightly sinister about Prague, just as there is about Lyon and Turin.”

John Banville

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

“If you look at practically anyone - I mean, I find this more and more - the more you look at people the more you find that they've actually manufactured themselves. People whose names that you know. I meet lots of people in my ordinary life, away from writing, who seem to be authentic, who seem to know where they've come from and who they are, but anyone that I deal with in, if you like, my profession, we all seem to have made ourselves. I think artists are all self-made.”

John Banville

Oblique dreamer (2000)

“As a boy I was very solitary but blissfully happy. We lived on the edge of town in Wexford and I wandered the fields with my dog, declaiming Keats to the trees.”

John Banville

John Banville: Who cares whodunnit? (2013)

“I like to hide in Ireland, but I like to think of myself as an internal exile.”

John Banville

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

“I always remember how a novel written by John Braine in the 1950s about working-class life in England, which was called Room at the Top, which was translated into Swedish as The Attic!”

John Banville

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

“Flaubert read too many books, and in consequence some of his own books stagger under the weight of his erudition. He said he'd read some preposterous number of books to prepare for the writing of Salammbô, and you can feel them dragging the novel down. It would have been much better if he'd made it all up.”

John Banville

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

“We writers are shy, nocturnal creatures. Push us into the light and the light blinds us.”

John Banville

14th time lucky (2005)

“The world is a dark place, and I find it endlessly funny.”

John Banville

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

“I feel a kind of intellectual regret, not an emotional regret, at having left my parents and that world behind. But it's not a great weight on my soul. In a way I wish it were. To leave one’s background without guilt is an indication of shallowness of character, I suspect.”

John Banville

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

“Every artist has a Dorian Gray slaving away in the attic.”

John Banville

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

“When I started writing I was a great rationalist and believed I was absolutely in control. But the older one gets, the more confused, and for an artist I think that is quite a good thing: you allow in more of your instinctual self; your dreams, fantasies and memories. It's richer, in a way.”

John Banville

14th time lucky (2005)

“When I created Quirke, he was 6ft 6in and blond. But then a woman reader wrote to me and said, 'Why do you keep saying his hair is blond? It's not. It's brown.' I wrote back to her and told her that, of course, she was right. So I darkened his hair and now that he's being played by Gabriel Byrne; with each successive book he gets a bit smaller and smaller.”

John Banville

John Banville: Who cares whodunnit? (2013)