Irish novelist (1945- )
All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie. It was a way of living; lies are life's almost-anagram.
JOHN BANVILLE
Shroud
Life, authentic life, is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation, the will butting its blunt head against the world's wall, suchlike, but when I look back I see that the greater part of my energies was always given over to the simple search for shelter, for comfort, for, yes, I admit it, for cosiness. This is a surprising, not to say shocking, realisation. Before, I saw myself as something of a buccaneer, facing all-comers with a cutlass in my teeth, but now I am compelled to acknowledge that this was a delusion. To be concealed, protected, guarded, that is all I have ever truly ever wanted, to burrow down into a place of womby warmth and cower there.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
The telephone ringing gave me a dreadful start. I have never got used to this machine, the way it crouches so malevolently, ready to start clamouring for attention when you least expect it, like a mad baby.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Untouchable
When he was young, the lesson learned from his mother, as much by cuffs as caresses, was that love is action--what you do, not what you feel--but perhaps, he thinks now, it was a false lesson, and that love is something else altogether, something he knows nothing of. He sees it, this love, hovering like the Paraclete above the heads of a fig-leafed Cranach couple, streaming divine grace down upon them in burning rays. Where was his soul when this pentecostal fire was falling from the sky?
JOHN BANVILLE
The Infinities
I have never done anything in my life that did not have a purpose, usually hidden, sometimes even from myself.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Untouchable
Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
I started to write when I was 11 or 12, doing bad imitations of Joyce. There were always white blossoms falling into the grave at the end of every story.
JOHN BANVILLE
"Oblique dreamer", The Guardian, September 17, 2000
This place. It was the noise that impressed me first of all. A terrible racket, yells and whistles, hoots of laughter, arguments, sobs. But there are moments of stillness, too, as if a great fear, or a great sadness, has fallen suddenly, striking us all speechless. The air stands motionless in the corridors, like stagnant water.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Book of Evidence
The past beats inside me like a second heart.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
This morning I realised for the first time that I am an old man. I was crossing Gower Street, my former stamping ground. I stepped off the path and something hindered me. Odd sensation, as if the air at my ankles had developed a flaw, seemed to turn--what is the word: viscid?--and resisted me and I almost stumbled. Bus thundering past with a grinning black-amoor at the wheel. What did he see? Sandals, mac, my inveterate string bag, old rheumy eye wild with fright. If I had been run over they would have said it was suicide, with relief all round.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Untouchable
I was always a distinct no-one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
I'm a little surprised that commercial success has arrived. I used to think that it was hopeless, that it would never happen.
JOHN BANVILLE
"Once More Admired Than Bought, A Writer Finally Basks in Success", New York Times, May 15, 1990
This was in the days when I was making myself over. So difficult it was, to judge just so, to forge the fine discriminations, to maintain a balance--no one could know how difficult. If it had been a work of art I was fashioning they would have applauded my mastery. Perhaps that was my mistake, to do it all in secret, instead of openly, with a flourish. They would have been entertained; they would have forgiven me; Harlequin is always forgiven, always survives.
JOHN BANVILLE
Shroud
If you look at practically anyone - I mean, I find this more and more - the more you look at people the more you find that they've actually manufactured themselves. People whose names that you know. I meet lots of people in my ordinary life, away from writing, who seem to be authentic, who seem to know where they've come from and who they are, but anyone that I deal with in, if you like, my profession, we all seem to have made ourselves. I think artists are all self-made.
JOHN BANVILLE
"Oblique dreamer", The Guardian, September 17, 2000
Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one’s living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. I couldn’t ask for anything better. It’s as near to godliness as I can get.... The great thrill is when a sentence that starts out being completely plain suddenly begins to sing, rising far above itself and above any expectation I might have had for it. That’s what keeps me going on those dark December days.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Paris Review, spring 2009
The daylight too is strange, even outside, in the yard, as if something has happened to it, as if something has been done to it, before it is allowed to reach us. It has an acid, lemony cast, and comes in two intensities: either it is not enough to see by or it sears the sight.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Book of Evidence
Let's not despise story-telling. Like all novelists, I have this low desire to tell people stories.
JOHN BANVILLE
"Oblique dreamer", The Guardian, September 17, 2000
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.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
There was a time when I quite liked what I saw in the looking-glass, but not anymore. Now I’m startled, and more than startled, by the visage that so abruptly appears there, never at all the one that I expect. I have been elbowed aside by a parody of myself, a sadly dishevelled figure in a Halloween mask made of sagging, pinkish- grey rubber that bears no more than a passing resemblance to the image of what I look like that I stubbornly retain in my head.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
There is a moment that comes in drunkenness, or on the far side of it, when, as is said to happen sometimes to the afflicted in the throes of a heart attack, I seem to separate from my body and float upward, and hang aloft, looking down on the spectacle of myself with disinterested attention.
JOHN BANVILLE
Shroud