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
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.
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.
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 fans of mine meet me, I can see the disappointment in their eyes. Every artist knows of this phenomenon.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I thought, 'That's me gone from the Booker Prize.
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.
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 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.