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
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.