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 like ideas. I find them more exciting than human behavior for the most part.
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 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.
Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don't do well, in the hope of learning.
It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.
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.
I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.
Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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 full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.
I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.