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 first thought that occurred to me, that night when I heard the chairman of the jury announce my name, was, Just think how many people hate me at this moment. Naturally, I wanted to annoy those people even further by being arrogant.
The trouble with you, Vic," he said, "is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.
I have never really got used to being on this earth. Sometimes I think our presence here is due to a cosmic blunder, that we were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and other, grimmer skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, off on the far side of the galaxy, whirling and whirling. And the ones who were meant for here, are they out there, baffled and homesick, like us? No, they would have become extinct long ago. How could they survive, these gentle earthlings, in a world that was made to contain us.
We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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.
I sometimes think that I might be slightly autistic. There might be a syndrome that hasn't been named. I don't seem to see the world in the same way that most people I know see it. They don't seem to be baffled by it.
I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist - I'd put novelist last.
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.
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.
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.
We're constantly losing - we're losing time, we're losing ourselves. I don't feel for the things I lost.
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.