“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, The Art of Fiction No. 200 (2009)
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John Banville 97
Irish writer 1945Related quotes

Space (1912)
Context: How if Space is really full of things we cannot see and as yet do not know? How if all animals and some savages have a cell in their brain or a nerve which responds to the invisible world? How if all Space be full of these landmarks, not material in our sense, but quite real? A dog barks at nothing, a wild beast makes an aimless circuit. Why? Perhaps because Space is made up of corridors and alleys, ways to travel and things to shun? For all we know, to a greater intelligence than ours the top of Mont Blanc may be as crowded as Piccadilly Circus.

2014, Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative Town Hall Speech (November 2014)

So there is a psychotic refusal to understand that the survival of the species is connected to the survival of the planet, you know? Because this sort of progress is a kind of church now. It is not amenable to reason. So it is very difficult to know how any real conversation can happen... <Br> A month or two ago, the Supreme Court of India...said that two million indigenous people should be evicted from their forest homes... Because that forest needs to be preserved as a sanctuary. But when, for the last 25 years, people were fighting against projects which were decimating millions of hectares and acres of forest, nobody cared... And when you are talking about evicting two million of the poorest people, stripping them of everything they ever had, there is little outrage. Any sense of talk of equality or justice seems to just have the same effect that blasphemy has in religious societies. That is what capitalism has become—a form of religion that will brook no questioning.
Democracy Now Arundhati Roy: Capitalism Is “a Form of Religion” Stopping Solutions to Climate Change & Inequality https://www.democracynow.org/2019/5/13/arundhati_roy_capitalism_is_a_form, (13 May 2019)
Interviews

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), pp. 60-61, note 94

Interview in Salon magazine ( 2 February 1998) http://web.archive.org/web/20000301183409/http://www.salon.com/books/int/1998/02/cov_si_02int.html

Source: 1975, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), Ch. 10: Atmosphere