John Banville Quotes
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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?
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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...
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When I started writing I was a great rationalist and believed I was absolutely in control. But the older one gets, the more confused, and for an artist I think that is quite a good thing: you allow in more of your instinctual self; your dreams, fantasies and memories. It's richer, in a way.
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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.
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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.
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I don't know what citizens of Prague must feel about these endless lines of tourists tramping over their streets.
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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.
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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!
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Ambiguity is the essence of Irish writing, I think.
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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.
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There is something slightly sinister about Prague, just as there is about Lyon and Turin.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I'm doing my best to not be too rude about it, but oh my God that Czech food...
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Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don't do well, in the hope of learning.
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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.
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We all yearn in our hearts to be Larkin's 'shit in the shuttered chateau', but few of us achieve that grand apotheosis.