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John Banville
104 quotes
“The world is a dark place, and I find it endlessly funny.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Copernicus stuck very closely to the facts, but in Kepler I invented freely, and it's a much better book because of that.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After all, who knows what the distant past was like? About Kepler and Copernicus, people often say, You captured the period so well! I always want to ask, How do you know? You weren't there either.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The first thought that occurred to me, that night when I heard the chairman of the jury announce my name, was, Just think how many people hate me at this moment. Naturally, I wanted to annoy those people even further by being arrogant.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every novelist knows – perhaps everyone knows who has written even a letter, or a page of a diary – that the process of composition involves two separate sensibilities.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“March in Ireland can be a very lovely month, if you like your air rain-washed and your light wind-shaken.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The force of the idea was such that I drew the car to the side of the road and stopped and, for some reason, laughed. It was a loud laugh, unsteady, and sounded, even to my own ears, slightly maniacal. Thinking back now, I realise it was less a laugh than the birth-cry of my dark and twin brother Benjamin Black.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Come, Benjamin, put your arm around me and we shall be comfortably one, mon semblable—mon frère!”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Coming from a tiny island, it's very exciting to be at sea in Central Europe in the sense of vast stretches of land all around one. We don't get that in Ireland.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm a little older now and I think I've lightened up a bit as I'm getting older.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Well, [Kepler] reminded me of myself – the little man running desperately in circles, trying to find an explanation for the world, for his place in it, to find a plausible system, to account for reality – and never finding it. Finding lots of rules and laws which are very important, but never actually finding his own way into what it is to be in the world – very much an existentialist before his time, I think.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[W]e would probably claim Kafka as an Irish writer. His tone of voice is certainly quite Irish: that sense of melancholy, that sense of strangeness and of being a stranger in the world. I think that we empathise with that very much indeed.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I suppose many people in Ireland would regard me as being more a European writer than an Irish writer. I don't think this is so.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't know what citizens of Prague must feel about these endless lines of tourists tramping over their streets.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I know that this is a cliché by now and I suppose that Prague people are sick and tired of hearing Prague referred to as ‘Magic Prague’, but, you know, I may complain about the tourists, but I am a tourist after all. I'd rather not be, but I am.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I like to hide in Ireland, but I like to think of myself as an internal exile.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A book at the very start comes to me as a nebulous geometric form, a kind of tension in space that has to be resolved. The resolution is effected by fleshing out the form with character, plot, dialogue, etc. But the original structure perseveres throughout, even when, or perhaps especially when, I am not conscious of it being at work. Art is a mysterious business.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One must try to keep a sensible perspective and not take oneself too seriously.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My friends tell me I must stop saying in public that I ‘hate all my novels’. What I mean is that I am profoundly dissatisfied with everything I have done simply because it is not good enough by my standards. But my standard is perfection, and as we know, perfection is not allowed to such as us. On the other hand, I begin every new book in the complete conviction that this time, this time I shall get it right. Rationally I know this will not be so, but art has its reasons.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A work of art is not about something, it is something, in the same way that life is not something that has meaning, only significance. And art's intentions are entirely innocent – no comment, no opinion, no attempted coercion. All – all! – art attempts to do is to quicken the sense of life, to make vivid for the reader the mysterious predicament of being alive for a brief span in this exquisite and terrible world.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every artist has a Dorian Gray slaving away in the attic.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was in Miami, reading at the book fair. My partner on the platform had won the Pulitzer Prize the previous day. At the book signing afterwards, Pulitzer Man had waiting for him a queue of admiring readers that stretched up the spine of Florida, while I had three people — an academic who was writing something on my work, the usual maniac in a raincoat, and a kindly chap who leaned down and said to me in a confidential whisper, “I'm not going to buy your book, but you looked so lonely I felt I had to come and talk to you.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I write in what we call Hiberno-English, and it would be disastrous to lose my literary accent, as both Joyce and Beckett began to do in exile. In their case the unique tone of voice they each unwittingly adopted only made for a deeper poetic intensity; I suspect if I were to undergo a similar loss the result would not be so productive.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Interviewer: What would you like carved onto your tombstone? Banville: I'd rather not have a tombstone.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.' This is how we all are.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I like to dress conservatively because then the outrageous things you say are even more outrageous.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I won the Booker Prize, I said that it was nice to see a work of art winning this prize and I've never been forgiven for that. When you get a prize, you're suppose to be humble. Somebody was interviewing me and said, 'This is a great day for Ireland'. I said, 'Why? Ireland didn't do it, I did it.' I wasn't forgiven for that either. I don't wear the green jersey and I don't hobnob with Michael D in the Park, although I quite like Michael D.”
John Banville (born 1945) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces—brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc. — 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.”
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). Original source.
“[Julian Gough's] notion that shouting the word 'feck' – Father Ted has a lot to answer for – and being grossly scatological will make him seem echt Irish only harms his argument. We who were born and continue to live in Ireland are always distressed by the stage-Irish antics so often to be encountered among the sons and daughters of the diaspora. But it is true, as the critic Declan Kiberd remarks, that no contemporary Irish writer has yet attempted the Great Irish Novel on social and political themes. Where is our Middlemarch, our Doctor Zhivago, our Rabbit trilogy? The fact is Irish fiction tends to be poetic rather than prosaic, which is something that non-Irish reviewers find hard to grasp. John McGahern used to say that there is verse and there is prose, and then there is poetry, and poetry can occur in either form, and that in Ireland it occurs more often in prose than in verse. There may be a grittily realistic novelist even now writing a masterpiece such as Mr Gough says he longs for, and, if so, I applaud her/him.”
John Banville (born 1945) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Julian Gough slams fellow Irish novelists as 'priestly caste' cut off from the culture, The Guardian (11 February 2010).