Top 40 John Banville Quotes

With crime fiction, you have to write a half-dozen before they catch on.

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.

When you’re writing there’s a deep, deep level of concentration way below your normal self. This strange voice, these strange sentences come out of you.

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

When I say I don’t like my own work, that doesn’t mean it isn’t better than everyone else’s.

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.

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

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.

I’ve been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he’s a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist – I’d put novelist last.

If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.

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.

All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.

Life is tragic but it’s equally comic.

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

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?

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.

Office life is very, very strange. It’s like no other way of living. You have an intimacy with people who you work with in the office, yet if you meet them on the streets, you both look the other way because you’re embarrassed.

I think I’m less the writer than I’m the written.

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

I am the worst judge of my books.

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.

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.

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

All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can’t know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself.

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.

I’m a hopeless 19th-century romantic.

I don’t own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.

My work is frequently described as cold, which is baffling, since it seems to me embarrassingly, shame-makingly, scandalously warm. I find my work filled with sentiment, and I can’t imagine why people find it cold.

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.

When fans of mine meet me, I can see the disappointment in their eyes. Every artist knows of this phenomenon.

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

It’s great people still care about books, and it’s great you can still fashion a life from literature.

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

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.

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.

The effect of prizes on one’s career – if that is what to call it – is considerable, since they give one more clout with publishers and more notoriety among journalists. The effect on one’s writing, however, is nil – otherwise, one would be in deep trouble.

We think we’re living in the present, but we’re really living in the past.

I don’t make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people.

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.

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