John Banville Quotations

What a little vessel of sadness we are, sailing in this muffled silence through the autumn dark.

We writers are shy, nocturnal creatures. Push us into the light and the light blinds us.

When you're writing there's a deep, deep level of concentration way below your normal self. This strange voice, these strange sentences come out of you.

When fans of mine meet me, I can see the disappointment in their eyes. Every artist knows of this phenomenon.

the public adulation for Saturday was worrying because here was a 9/11 book that everyone was praising to the sky, making into a bestseller, and it was not a good book for McEwan, who is a very, very good writer. But maybe I shouldn't have been so pompous.

We're constantly losing - we're losing time, we're losing ourselves. I don't feel for the things I lost.

I always think that if you know somebody's name then there's something slightly fraudulent about that person. Otherwise we wouldn't have heard of him or her.

I thought, 'That's me gone from the Booker Prize.

I suppose it's possible that a writer would have feeling for his characters, but I can't see how, because writing is such a meticulous, intricate, technical business. I wish I could say that I love my characters and that frequently they take over the book and run away with the plot and so on. But they don't exist.

My work is frequently described as cold, which is baffling, since it seems to me embarrassingly, shame-makingly, scandalously warm. I find my work filled with sentiment, and I can't imagine why people find it cold.

I wonder about the wisdom of doing the review. Sometimes I wish I hadn't. Some people saw it as one novelist giving a kicking to another and that's not what I intended.

I thought it was remarkable on his part to be so generous.

The 9/11 attack was a huge and terrible thing but it was not unique. I come from a country where, if you put it in scale, some say 350,000 people would have died from the violence.

You know, artists don't really have all that much experience of life. We make a huge amount out of the small experience that we do have.

When I say I don't like my own work, that doesn't mean it isn't better than everyone else's.

Why does the past seem so magical, so fraught, so luminous? At the time it was just, ugh, another boring bloody day. But, to look back on, it's a day full of miracles and light and extraordinary events. Why is this? What process do we apply to the past, to give it this vividness? I don't know.

With crime fiction, you have to write a half-dozen before they catch on.

Writers are just like other people, except slightly more obsessed.

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. Which is how it should be.

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.

I sometimes think that I might be slightly autistic. There might be a syndrome that hasn't been named. I don't seem to see the world in the same way that most people I know see it. They don't seem to be baffled by it.

I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist - I'd put novelist last.

Office life is very, very strange. It's like no other way of living. You have an intimacy with people who you work with in the office, yet if you meet them on the streets, you both look the other way because you're embarrassed.

Someone said the best gift a man can give his son is to die young. When you think about it, it's true. I was in my early 30s and I did feel freed by it, awful as it is to confess.

Death is such a strange thing. One minute you're here and then just gone. You'd think there would be an anteroom, a place where you could be visited before you go.

I want my art to make people look at the world in a new way. I mean, what's the point of the art of writing if it doesn't take you into the mysterious?

I know some of my memories are made up and they are far more powerful than the things that actually happened. For example, I always remember my brother posting me a copy of 'Dubliners' from Africa, but he says he never did.

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.

I didn't envy the judges their task this year. Obviously the novel is far from dead.

I'd given up Catholicism in my teens but something of it stays with me. I try to create the perfect sentence - that's as close to godliness as I can get.

I don't see how English as we use it in Europe can be revivified. It's like Latin must have been in about A.D. 300, tired and used up. All one can do is press very hard stylistically to make it glow.

How I envy writers who can work on aeroplanes or in hotel rooms. On the run I can produce an article or a book review, or even a film script, but for fiction I must have my own desk, my own wall with my own postcards pinned to it, and my own window not to look out of.

You can't write about fantasy without being ridiculous.

This is a great surprise and a great pleasure. Any one of these books could have won. To my colleagues I say just hang around and it will come. I have hung around for many years.

The English did many terrible things but one great thing you did was give us this extraordinary language ... and it works for us.

All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s devoted Beckett readers greeted each successively shorter volume from the master with a mixture of awe and apprehensiveness; it was like watching a great mathematician wielding an infinitesimal calculus, his equations approaching nearer and still nearer to the null point.

There are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I know seems to have fallen out of my mind like a shower of rain, and I am gripped for a moment in paralysed dismay, waiting for it all to come back but with no certainty that it will.

You will remember this when all else fades, this moment, here, together, by this well. There will be certain days, and certain nights, you’ll feel my presence near you, hear my voice. You’ll think you have imagined it and yet, inside you, you will catch an answering cry. On April evenings, when the rain has ceased, your heart will shake, you’ll weep for nothing, pine for what’s not there. For you, this life will never be enough, there will forever be an emptiness, where once the god was all in all in you.

Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.

The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.

The first thought that occurred to me, that night when I heard the chairman of the jury announce my name, was, Just think how many people hate me at this moment. Naturally, I wanted to annoy those people even further by being arrogant.

I dont know if there is a personal identity. We all imagine that we are absolute individuals. But when we begin to look for where this individuality resides, its very difficult to find.

The trouble with you, Vic," he said, "is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.

If they give me the bloody prize, why can't they say nice things about me?

All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie. It was a way of living; lies are life's almost-anagram.

Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.

I have never really got used to being on this earth. Sometimes I think our presence here is due to a cosmic blunder, that we were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and other, grimmer skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, off on the far side of the galaxy, whirling and whirling. And the ones who were meant for here, are they out there, baffled and homesick, like us? No, they would have become extinct long ago. How could they survive, these gentle earthlings, in a world that was made to contain us.

The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.

I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking off desperately toward the horizon as if in mute search for a sign of rescue.

What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it.

These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses. It is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.

Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.

The telephone ringing gave me a dreadful start. I have never got used to this machine, the way it crouches so malevolently, ready to start clamouring for attention when you least expect it, like a mad baby.

The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.

All I wanted was to be left alone. They abhor a vacuum, other people. You find a quiet corner where you can hunker down in peace, and the next minute there they are, crowding around you in their party hats, tooting their paper whistles in your face and insisting you get up and join in the knees-up.

Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.

A plot begins when somebody has something to hide.

Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.

I live in Dublin, God knows why. There are greatly more congenial places I could have settled in - Italy, France, Manhattan - but I like the climate here, and Irish light seems to be essential for me and for my writing.

No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.

When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it's finished. A certain point comes at which you can't do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence.

The secret of survival is a defective imagination.

All one wants to do is make a small, finished, polished, burnished, beautiful object . . . I mean, that's all one wants to do. One has nothing to say about the world, or society, or morals or politics or anything else. One just wants to get the damn thing done, you know? Kafka had it right when he said that the artist is the man who has nothing to say. It's true. You get the thing done, but you don't actually have anything to communicate, apart from the object itself.

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself.

Life is tragic but it's equally comic.

Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.

We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.

I have this fantasy. I'm walking past a bookshop and I click my fingers and all my books go blank. So I can start again and get it right.

We artists love to talk tough, but we're just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it.

The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.

In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.

I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.

I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.

I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.

I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.

I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.

I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.

I don't make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people.

I like ideas. I find them more exciting than human behavior for the most part.

I am the worst judge of my books.

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

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.

It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.

I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.

The effect of prizes on one's career - if that is what to call it - is considerable, since they give one more clout with publishers and more notoriety among journalists. The effect on one's writing, however, is nil - otherwise, one would be in deep trouble.

...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left

I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist.

Enormous morning, ponderous, meticulous; gray light streaking each bare branch, each single twig, along one side, making another tree, of glassy veins.

That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business.

How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.

I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.

He knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minuscule absence, a barely detective gap in the so-called grand scheme, one unit fewer now. Or not even that, not even an empty space where he once was, for all will rush immediately to fill that vacuum. Pft. Gone. Recollections of him will remain in the minds of others for a while, but presently those others too will die and his few relics with them. And then all will be dark.

Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.

In the city of flesh I travel without maps, a worried tourist: and Ottilie was a very Venice. I stumbled lost in the blue shade of her pavements. Here was a dreamy stillness, a swaying, the splash of an oar. Then, when I least expected it, suddenly I stepped out into the great square, the sunlight, and she was a flock of birds scattering with soft cries in my arms.

Poetry is that magic which consists in awakening sensations with the help of a combination of sounds ... that sorcery by which ideas are necessarily communicated to us, in a definite way, by words which nevertheless do not express them.

What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean.

And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.