John Banville Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Copernicus stuck very closely to the facts, but in Kepler I invented freely, and it's a much better book because of that.
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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.
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One must try to keep a sensible perspective and not take oneself too seriously.
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Let's not despise story-telling. Like all novelists, I have this low desire to tell people stories.
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The world is a dark place, and I find it endlessly funny.
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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.
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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.
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Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.
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The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.
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The past beats inside me like a second heart.
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I'm a little surprised that commercial success has arrived. I used to think that it was hopeless, that it would never happen.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I'm a little older now and I think I've lightened up a bit as I'm getting older.
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The 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.
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Oh, I'm terribly ignorant of Czech literature. It's disgraceful really.
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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.
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We writers are shy, nocturnal creatures. Push us into the light and the light blinds us.
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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.