John Banville Quotes

105 Sourced Quotes

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
I like to dress conservatively because then the outrageous things you say are even more outrageous.

John Banville
Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self.

John Banville
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
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
I'm doing my best to not be too rude about it, but oh my God that Czech food...

John Banville
Art is like sex: when you're doing it, nothing else matters. Away from his desk the novelist can care deeply about the social, political, moral aspects of what he is writing but when he sits down to write, all those concerns fall away and nothing matters except the putting down of one carefully chosen word after another carefully chosen word, until a sentence is finished, then a paragraph, then a page, then a chapter, then a book. When I'm working I don't care about anything, not even myself. All my concentration is directed towards the making of the thing on the page. The rest is just stuff — even though it is the stuff of life.

John Banville
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
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
Dogs are dim creatures, do not speak to me of their good sense—have you ever heard of a team of tomcats hauling a sled across the frozen wastes?

John Banville
Summoned, one shuffles guiltily into the department of trivia.

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

John Banville
Let's not despise story-telling. Like all novelists, I have this low desire to tell people stories.

John Banville
Wodehouse is very interesting. There must be all kinds of darknesses in that man's life.

John Banville
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
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
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
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
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
Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.

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

John Banville
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