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
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.
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.
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 don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
I am the worst judge of my books.
It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.
With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.
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.
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 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?
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.
Writers are just like other people, except slightly more obsessed.