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
We're constantly losing - we're losing time, we're losing ourselves. I don't feel for the things I lost.
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.
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.
I didn't envy the judges their task this year. Obviously the novel is far from dead.
How I envy writers who can work on aeroplanes or in hotel rooms. On the run I can produce an article or a book review, or even a film script, but for fiction I must have my own desk, my own wall with my own postcards pinned to it, and my own window not to look out of.
I always think that if you know somebody's name then there's something slightly fraudulent about that person. Otherwise we wouldn't have heard of him or her.
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.
Someone said the best gift a man can give his son is to die young. When you think about it, it's true. I was in my early 30s and I did feel freed by it, awful as it is to confess.
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.
In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.