John Banville Quotes
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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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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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Come, Benjamin, put your arm around me and we shall be comfortably one, mon semblable-mon frère!
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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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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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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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I don't know what citizens of Prague must feel about these endless lines of tourists tramping over their streets.
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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.
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Summoned, one shuffles guiltily into the department of trivia.
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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'm doing my best to not be too rude about it, but oh my God that Czech food...
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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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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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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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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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Every artist has a Dorian Gray slaving away in the attic.
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There is something slightly sinister about Prague, just as there is about Lyon and Turin.
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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.