John Banville Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If they give me the bloody prize, why can't they say nice things about me?
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I like to hide in Ireland, but I like to think of myself as an internal exile.
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Interviewer: What would you like carved onto your tombstone? Banville: I'd rather not have a tombstone.
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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.
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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.
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Every artist has a Dorian Gray slaving away in the attic.
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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.
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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.
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Wodehouse is very interesting. There must be all kinds of darknesses in that man's life.
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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.
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I like to dress conservatively because then the outrageous things you say are even more outrageous.
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Come, Benjamin, put your arm around me and we shall be comfortably one, mon semblable-mon frère!
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Summoned, one shuffles guiltily into the department of trivia.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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March in Ireland can be a very lovely month, if you like your air rain-washed and your light wind-shaken.