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John Banville
104 quotes
“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”
John Banville (born 1945) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Sea (2005, .
“Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.”
John Banville (born 1945) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Banville on Saturday, from The New York Review of Books (source dated 10 May 2005).
“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 (born 1945) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote from The militant magician, The Guardian (28 December 2002).
“If they give me the bloody prize, why can't they say nice things about me?”
John Banville (born 1945) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: John Banville, The Guardian (22 July 2008).
“The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.”
John Banville (born 1945) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The opening line of a juvenile and "dreadful imitation" of Joyce's Dubliners - John Banville, The Guardian (22 July 2008).
“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 (born 1945) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: My other life: John Banville, The Observer (30 November 2008).
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's amazing what success will do. I've just started a new book after taking a break of a year and a half since finishing 'The Book of Evidence,' and I'm fascinated to see if I can detect in myself a voice saying, 'Tone that bit down; make that bit easier; give them a few laughs,' which would be absolutely fatal. I don't think it's happening, but you can't tell what's happening beneath the surface.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I think back to then, from out of this sepulchral silence, I am aware of a ceaseless hubbub of voices loudly saying things no one seemed in the least inclined to listen to. It was the Age of Statements.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ah, what heights of contempt I was capable of in those days! Now, in old age, I have largely lost that faculty, and I miss it, for it was passion of a sort.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have always disliked the sea, its surliness, its menace, its vast reaches and unknowable, shudder-inducing depths.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Diderot said that what we do is, we erect a statue in our own image inside ourselves—idealised, you know, but still recognisable—and then spend our lives engages in the effort to make ourselves into its likeness.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But what comfort does belief offer, when it contains within it its own antithesis, the glistening drop of poison at the heart? Is the Pascalian wager sufficient to sustain a life, a real life, in the real world? The fact that you place your bet on red does not mean that the black is not still there.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I suspect that significant first encounters only take on their aura of significance in retrospect.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man is only lovable in the multitude, and at a good distance.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have tried to explain to her that the concept of bravery is entirely spurious. We are what we are, we do what we do.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was pondering the question, which I have pondered before, of whether such great revelatory moments really so occur, or if it is only that, out of need, our lives so lacking in drama, we invest past events with a significance they do not warrant.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All the talk now is of freedom and pride (pride!), but these young hotheads in their pink bell-bottoms, clamouring for the right to do it in the streets if they feel like it, do not seem to appreciate, or at least seem to wish to deny, the aphrodisiac properties of secrecy and fear.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let's not despise story-telling. Like all novelists, I have this low desire to tell people stories.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ambiguity is the essence of Irish writing, I think.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The older I get, the more confused I get. I used to think that age would bring wisdom. It doesn't, it just brings confusion. But I find that this confusion is artistically useful. It's a kind of progression, a negative progression. It's moving into areas that you didn't know were there. It becomes more dreamlike all the time. When I was starting out as a novelist, I would have been furious if anyone said to me that novels are dream-like or that they're doing things the novelist didn't know he was doing. Now, I find that it's absolutely true.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Wodehouse is very interesting. There must be all kinds of darknesses in that man's life.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We writers are shy, nocturnal creatures. Push us into the light and the light blinds us.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Summoned, one shuffles guiltily into the department of trivia.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Oh, I'm terribly ignorant of Czech literature. It's disgraceful really.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm doing my best to not be too rude about it, but oh my God that Czech food...”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is something slightly sinister about Prague, just as there is about Lyon and Turin.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I hesitate to talk about Czech food. [...] The people are very sweet, wonderfully cultured, very friendly, but my God how they eat that food I do not know. It is surely the most disgusting cuisine in the world.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We cannot all afford a farm in Cuba or a suite at the George V in newly liberated Paris, and more often than not must strive to forge our clean, well-lighted sentences at a folding table wedged between the baby's cot and the dining table.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We all yearn in our hearts to be Larkin's "shit in the shuttered chateau", but few of us achieve that grand apotheosis.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fiction is just a constant torment, and an embarrassment. I loathe my fiction. I have a fantasy when I'm passing a bookstore that I could click my fingers and all my books would go blank, so that I could start again and get them right.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My wife says I had a nervous breakdown during the writing of Mefisto. Maybe I did, but what's a nervous breakdown for a writer? For a writer every day is a nervous breakdown. [...] The book came out in the spring, and I remember I spent that following summer digging my garden — Voltaire would have been proud. I made a wonderful garden. Grew beans, lettuces. I was healing myself from some kind of traumatic process that I don't pretend to understand. All right, let's agree with my wife and call it a nervous breakdown.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source