John Banville
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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
We're constantly losing - we're losing time, we're losing ourselves. I don't feel for the things I lost.
I didn't envy the judges their task this year. Obviously the novel is far from dead.
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 thought, 'That's me gone from the Booker Prize.
Writers are just like other people, except slightly more obsessed.
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.
When I say I don't like my own work, that doesn't mean it isn't better than everyone else's.
Why does the past seem so magical, so fraught, so luminous? At the time it was just, ugh, another boring bloody day. But, to look back on, it's a day full of miracles and light and extraordinary events. Why is this? What process do we apply to the past, to give it this vividness? I don't know.
Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self.
To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.
If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.
The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.
Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.