John Banville Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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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'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 don't know what citizens of Prague must feel about these endless lines of tourists tramping over their streets.
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Ambiguity is the essence of Irish writing, I think.
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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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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 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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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 is something slightly sinister about Prague, just as there is about Lyon and Turin.
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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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I'm doing my best to not be too rude about it, but oh my God that Czech food...
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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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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.