John Banville Quotes

105 Sourced Quotes

We 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
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
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
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
Every artist has a Dorian Gray slaving away in the attic.

John Banville
I like to hide in Ireland, but I like to think of myself as an internal exile.

John Banville
If they give me the bloody prize, why can't they say nice things about me?

John Banville
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
What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it.

John Banville
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
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
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
How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.

John Banville
And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.

John Banville
Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.

John Banville