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John Banville Quotes
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William John Banville , who writes as John Banville and sometimes as Benjamin Black, is an Irish novelist, adapter of dramas, and screenwriter. Recognised for his precise, cold, forensic prose style, Nabokovian inventiveness, and for the dark humour of his generally arch narrators, Banville is considered to be "one of the most imaginative literary novelists writing in the English language today." He has been described as "the heir to Proust, via Nabokov."

Banville has received numerous awards in his career. His novel The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Guinness Peat Aviation award in 1989. His fourteenth novel, The Sea, won the Booker Prize in 2005. In 2011, Banville was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, while 2013 brought both the Irish PEN Award and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. In 2014 he won the Prince of Asturias Award in Letters. He is considered a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Banville's stated ambition is to give his prose "the kind of denseness and thickness that poetry has".

He has published a number of crime novels as Benjamin Black, most featuring Quirke, an Irish pathologist based in Dublin.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007.

✵ 8. December 1945   •   Other names Benjamin Black, جان بنویل
John Banville photo
John Banville: 97   quotes 0   likes

John Banville Quotes

“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)

Thinking

“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)

Life

“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)

Books , Feeling , Reading

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

John Banville

14th time lucky (2005)

Light

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

John Banville

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

World

“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)

World , Way , Feeling , Soul

“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)

Dreams , Way , Thinking , Memory

“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)

Books , Success

“I often think that there was nothing more exciting and erotic than getting a glimpse of a woman's leg at the top of her stockings. There's something about that white bulge and for anybody who grew up in my time, nothing replaces that, nothing. I remember I had a girlfriend when I was 16 and she had this bra – it used to open down the front – which I thought was absolutely wonderful. It was like opening a tabernacle.”

John Banville

John Banville: Who cares whodunnit? (2013)

Thinking , Time

“I remember my father didn't say very much – he was a very laconic man. When he'd go to a party, he would become very animated. My mother would say – 'Look at him. He never says a word at home and look at him now.”

John Banville

This is how we all are.
John Banville: Who cares whodunnit? (2013)

Home , Animals

“Look at what goes on in our heads when we think about our family or we think about sex. There are things in there that you'd never really say to anybody. You're even ashamed to think it yourself.”

John Banville

John Banville: Who cares whodunnit? (2013)

Family , Sex , Thinking

“I never learned the names of the streets because I couldn't wait to get out. It was too small and I was bored. I was a pretentious little twerp and I had ideas above my station, which everyone should have. I was deeply ambitious but I was deeply dismissive of what was there and that was a mistake. Wexford was a fascinating town and so was the society. I remember a friend of mine telling me about wife-swapping parties that went on there and how people would throw their keys into the middle of a bowl. This was the late 1950s. I didn't believe a word of it. If I believed him and looked about, I would have found another version of Wexford. I'm not saying that I wanted to be at wife-swapping parties, but the Wexford I imagined wasn't necessarily the Wexford that was real. So I blinded myself and I was just as narrow-minded and blinkered as the people whom I despised there. That was a mistake.”

John Banville

John Banville: Who cares whodunnit? (2013)

People , Imagination , Idea , Learning

“All art is to some extent shaped by what has gone before. But that is an organic process, not a conscious intention. Novels are made out of novels as much as they are out of life.”

John Banville

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

Life , Art

“There had been rain but it had stopped, and the light from a luminously clouded sky was pewter-bright, and puddles on the road were shivering in the wind, and the rooks above the trees in St Anne's Park were being tossed about the air like scraps of charred paper.”

John Banville

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

Tree , Light

“One of my mottoes as a writer is a little jotting from Kafka's journals: ‘Never again psychology!’ But alas, humankind is obsessed with its psychological workings, and since the novel can only treat of humankind... You see my predicament.”

John Banville

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

“If you think I'm being bleak, I'm not. It's wonderful to be making yourself up. That's what makes life so exciting. It's an unending adventure.”

John Banville

John Banville: Who cares whodunnit? (2013)

Life , Thinking

“I don't know anything about myself. Put it this way, there is no self. I believe that we're a compendium of personalities. We're whoever we meet. We go through the day being who we think we should be and who we think we'd like to be.”

John Banville

John Banville: Who cares whodunnit? (2013)

Way , Thinking , Personality

“I'm a little older now and I think I've lightened up a bit as I'm getting older.”

John Banville

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

Thinking

“When I was young, art for me was a new religion. Now I see the aims and ends of art as less grand. If I can catch the play of light on a wall, and catch it just so, that is enough for me. I don’t want to write about human behavior. Art now seems to me in many ways the absolute opposite of psychology. It’s simply saying, This is how it is. This is how it looks, how it feels. To describe things well is far more worthwhile than the kind of cheap psychologizing, or even expensive psychologizing, that the novel so often indulges in.”

John Banville

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

Religion , Art , Way , Behavior

“Once in the 1930s, the Inland Revenue did an investigation into Yeats's tax returns because they could not believe someone so famous could have such small sales. One should never allow oneself to be discouraged by small sales. As Pinter says, I stuck to my guns.”

John Banville

14th time lucky (2005)

“For me, a line has to sing before it does anything else. The great thrill is when a sentence that starts out being completely plain suddenly begins to sing, rising far above itself and above any expectation I might have had for it. That's what keeps me going on those dark December days when I think about how I could be living instead of writing.”

John Banville

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

Thinking , Singing

“A boy in his teens! What did I know about death? This is a problem for Irish writers — our literary forebears are enormous. They stand behind us like Easter Island statues, and we keep trying to measure up to them, leaping towards heights we can't possibly reach. I suppose that's a good thing, but it makes for a painful early life for the writer. Anyway, hunched there over my Aunt Sadie's Remington, I was starting to learn how to write. Now, fifty years later, I'm still learning.”

John Banville

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

Life , Death , Pain , Boy

“Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.”

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).

“My books must be an absolute nightmare to translate. I wouldn't do it. I had a couple of them in Japanese some years ago and my wife met a Japanese woman who said that she had read the books. And she asked her what the translations were like. This woman said they were the worst translation she had ever read in her life. She said she didn't recognise the books when she finally read them in English.”

John Banville

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

Life , Books , Reading

“Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces—brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc.”

John Banville

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.
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.

Game , Books , Bad luck