John Banville Quotes
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Every artist has a Dorian Gray slaving away in the attic.
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Wodehouse is very interesting. There must be all kinds of darknesses in that man's life.
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Summoned, one shuffles guiltily into the department of trivia.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Come, Benjamin, put your arm around me and we shall be comfortably one, mon semblable-mon frère!
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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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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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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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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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There is something slightly sinister about Prague, just as there is about Lyon and Turin.
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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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I'm doing my best to not be too rude about it, but oh my God that Czech food...
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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.