John Banville quotes - page 3

[On The Sea being filmed] It's not a blockbuster and it's not going to earn half a billion in the first weekend, but it's a work of art and I'm very pleased with it. (John Banville)
Art is like sex: when you're doing it, nothing else matters. Away from his desk the novelist can care deeply about the social, political, moral aspects of what he is writing but when he sits down to write, all those concerns fall away and nothing matters except the putting down of one carefully chosen word after another carefully chosen word, until a sentence is finished, then a paragraph, then a page, then a chapter, then a book. When I'm working I don't care about anything, not even myself. All my concentration is directed towards the making of the thing on the page. The rest is just stuff - even though it is the stuff of life.
John Banville
Summoned, one shuffles guiltily into the department of trivia.
John Banville
Come, Benjamin, put your arm around me and we shall be comfortably one, mon semblable-mon frère!
John Banville
Fiction is just a constant torment, and an embarrassment. I loathe my fiction. I have a fantasy when I'm passing a bookstore that I could click my fingers and all my books would go blank, so that I could start again and get them right.
John Banville
My friends tell me I must stop saying in public that I ‘hate all my novels'. What I mean is that I am profoundly dissatisfied with everything I have done simply because it is not good enough by my standards. But my standard is perfection, and as we know, perfection is not allowed to such as us. On the other hand, I begin every new book in the complete conviction that this time, this time I shall get it right. Rationally I know this will not be so, but art has its reasons.
John Banville
The force of the idea was such that I drew the car to the side of the road and stopped and, for some reason, laughed. It was a loud laugh, unsteady, and sounded, even to my own ears, slightly maniacal. Thinking back now, I realise it was less a laugh than the birth-cry of my dark and twin brother Benjamin Black.
John Banville
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.
John Banville
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.
John Banville
I don't know what citizens of Prague must feel about these endless lines of tourists tramping over their streets.
John Banville
A book at the very start comes to me as a nebulous geometric form, a kind of tension in space that has to be resolved. The resolution is effected by fleshing out the form with character, plot, dialogue, etc. But the original structure perseveres throughout, even when, or perhaps especially when, I am not conscious of it being at work. Art is a mysterious business. (John Banville)
I like to dress conservatively because then the outrageous things you say are even more outrageous.
John Banville
Saramago is ... interesting, but I don't think I would put it higher than that ... [he] ventures too far into the realm of 'magic realism' for my taste. Reality itself is magical enough without inventing whimsicalities.
John Banville
Well, [Kepler] reminded me of myself – the little man running desperately in circles, trying to find an explanation for the world, for his place in it, to find a plausible system, to account for reality – and never finding it. Finding lots of rules and laws which are very important, but never actually finding his own way into what it is to be in the world – very much an existentialist before his time, I think.
John Banville
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.
John Banville
[W]e 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.
John Banville
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.
John Banville
Oh, I'm terribly ignorant of Czech literature. It's disgraceful really.
John Banville
[T]he older I get the more I realise that the world is not as varied as we thought it was when we were young. Most places are much alike.
John Banville
I'm a little surprised that commercial success has arrived. I used to think that it was hopeless, that it would never happen.
John Banville
When I stand up from my writing desk, "John Banville", or "Benjamin Black" – that is, the one whose name will appear on the title page – vanishes on the instant, since he only existed while the writing was being done. (John Banville)
So vivid is my recollection of the birth of Benjamin Black that surely, I feel, a cunning artificer has been at work, fashioning a surreally realistic picture of something that happened quite differently from what I seem to remember. Consider that light falling on the sea, how effulgent and steady it is; consider the trees, improbably full-leafed for the time of year – and look at those birds! Has Madam Memory really such a piercing eye for detail, are her powers of recall so comprehensive?
John Banville
March in Ireland can be a very lovely month, if you like your air rain-washed and your light wind-shaken.
John Banville
T. S. Eliot said it is no business of the artist to think. I presume he meant it's only the business of the artist to feel, but I like the notion of there being a mind behind the fiction that I read and that I write.
John Banville
There is something slightly sinister about Prague, just as there is about Lyon and Turin.
John Banville