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John Banville

I don't know if there is a personal identity. We all imagine that we are absolute individuals. But when we begin to look for where this individuality resides, it's very difficult to find.

— John Banville identity

We writers are shy, nocturnal creatures. Push us into the light and the light blinds us.

— John Banville light

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.

— John Banville books

Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.

— John Banville time

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.

— John Banville time

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.

— John Banville time

I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.

— John Banville failure

I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.

— John Banville self

We artists love to talk tough, but we're just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it.

— John Banville love

With the crime novels, it's delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. It's like having a fictitious family.

— John Banville family

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.

— John Banville time

I'd given up Catholicism in my teens but something of it stays with me. I try to create the perfect sentence - that's as close to godliness as I can get.

— John Banville god

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.

— John Banville art

I live in Dublin, God knows why. There are greatly more congenial places I could have settled in - Italy, France, Manhattan - but I like the climate here, and Irish light seems to be essential for me and for my writing.

— John Banville writing

I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist.

— John Banville art

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.

— John Banville writing

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.

— John Banville hope

I like ideas. I find them more exciting than human behavior for the most part.

— John Banville art

I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.

— John Banville work

Writers are just like other people, except slightly more obsessed.

— John Banville people

I don't see how English as we use it in Europe can be revivified. It's like Latin must have been in about A.D. 300, tired and used up. All one can do is press very hard stylistically to make it glow.

— John Banville

All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.

— John Banville life

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.

— John Banville strange

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.

— John Banville power

I want my art to make people look at the world in a new way. I mean, what's the point of the art of writing if it doesn't take you into the mysterious?

— John Banville writing

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

— John Banville art

I dont know if there is a personal identity. We all imagine that we are absolute individuals. But when we begin to look for where this individuality resides, its very difficult to find.

— John Banville identity

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