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 fans of mine meet me, I can see the disappointment in their eyes. Every artist knows of this phenomenon.
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.
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.
Writers are just like other people, except slightly more obsessed.
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.
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.
I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.
In the city of flesh I travel without maps, a worried tourist: and Ottilie was a very Venice. I stumbled lost in the blue shade of her pavements. Here was a dreamy stillness, a swaying, the splash of an oar. Then, when I least expected it, suddenly I stepped out into the great square, the sunlight, and she was a flock of birds scattering with soft cries in my arms.