John Banville
John Banville
William John Banville, who writes as John Banville and sometimes as Benjamin Black, is an Irish novelist, adapter of dramas, and screenwriter. Recognised for his precise, cold, forensic prose style, Nabokovian inventiveness, and for the dark humour of his generally arch narrators, Banville is considered to be "one of the most imaginative literary novelists writing in the English language today." He has been described as "the heir to Proust, via Nabokov."...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth8 December 1945
CountryIreland
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.