Irish novelist (1945- )
When I was a child and heard about angels, I was both frightened and fascinated by the thought of these enormous, invisible presences in our midst. I conceived of them not as white-robed androgynes with yellow locks and thick gold wings, which was how my friend Matty Wilson had described them to me--Matty was the predecessor of all sorts of arcane knowledge--but as big, dark, blundering men, massive in their weightlessness, given to pranks and ponderous play, who might knock you over, or break you in half, without meaning to. When a child from Miss Molyneaux's infant school in Carrickdrum fell under the hoofs of a dray-horse one day and was trampled to death, I, a watchful six year old, knew who was to blame; I pictured his guardian angel standing over the child's crushed form with his big hands helplessly extended, not sure whether to be contrite or to laugh.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Untouchable
Did I, do I, love them? It is a simple question but extremely ticklish. I shielded them from what dangers I could, did not stint or spoil, taught them such virtues as I knew and as I judged they would benefit from. I worried they would suffer falls, cut themselves, catch a cold, contract leprosy. I think it safe to say that in certain dire circumstances if called upon I would have given up my life to save theirs. But all that, it seems, was not enough: a further effort was required, no, not an effort but an effect, an affect, whatever to say--a state of being, let us call it, a stance in relation to the world, which is what they mean by love.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Infinities
We're all the people in our books. A few people who read Eclipse in manuscript said that they felt almost embarrassed because it seemed to be so personal. I suppose, in a way, it should be gratifying but I find it puzzling. I certainly didn't set out to write about myself. Physically, I'm entirely different from Cleave. I don't have the same attitudes - but maybe I did.
JOHN BANVILLE
"Oblique dreamer", The Guardian, September 17, 2000
He made the mistake of imagining that his possessions were a measure of his own worth, and strutted and crowed, parading his things like a schoolboy with a champion catapult.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Book of Evidence
A dream that he dreamt in the night returns to him, a fragment of it. He was dashing through the dust of immemorial battle bearing something in his arms, large but not heavy, a precious but burdensome cargo--what was it?--and all about him were the mass of warriors bellowing and the ringing clash of swords and spears, the swish of arrows, the creak and crunch of chariot wheels. A venerable site, an antique war.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Infinities
I am kept locked up here like some exotic animal, last survivor of a species they had thought extinct. They should let in people to view me, the girl-eater, svelte and dangerous, padding to and fro in my cage, my terrible green glance flickering past the bars, give them something to dream about, tucked up cosy in their beds of a night.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Book of Evidence
Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.
JOHN BANVILLE
attributed, Irish Writers and Their Creative Process
Espionage has something of the quality of a dream. In the spy's world, as in dreams, the terrain is always uncertain. You put your foot on what looks like solid ground and it gives way under you and you go into a kind of free fall, turning slowly tail over tip and clutching onto things that are themselves falling. This instability, this myriad-ness, that the world takes on, is both the attraction and terror of being a spy.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Untouchable
Guilt is the only affect I know of that does not diminish with time.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Untouchable
By the way, leafing through my dictionary I am struck by the poverty of language when it comes to naming or describing badness. Evil, wickedness, mischief, these words imply an agency, the conscious or at least active doing of wrong. They do not signify the bad in its inert, neutral, self-sustaining state.... It makes me wonder. I ask myself if perhaps the thing itself - badness - does not exist at all, if these strangely vague and imprecise words are only a kind of ruse, a kind of elaborate cover for the fact that nothing is there. Or perhaps words are an attempt to make it be there?
JOHN BANVILLE
The Book of Evidence
Although it was autumn and not summer the dark-gold sunlight and the inky shadows, long and slender in the shape of felled cypresses, were the same, and there was the same sense of everything drenched and jewelled and the same ultramarine glitter on the sea. I felt inexplicably lightened; it was as if the evening, in all the drench and drip of its fallacious pathos, had temporarily taken over from me the burden of grieving.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
That’s one of the many things I hate about life, that it’s a hideously clichéd business.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Paris Review, spring 2009
There is something about gin, the tang in it of the deep wildwood, perhaps, that always makes me think of twilight and mists and dead maidens. Tonight it tinkled in my mouth like secret laughter.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Book of Evidence
The past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. And yet, what existence, really, does it have, the past? After all, it is only what the present was, once, the present that is gone, no more than that.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
I had a sudden image of myself as a sort of large dark simian something slumped there at the table, or not a something but a nothing, rather, a hole in the room, a palpable absence, a darkness visible.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
When darkness sifts from the air like fine soft soot and light spreads slowly out of the east then all but the most wretched of humankind rally.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Infinities
Summoned, one shuffles guiltily into the department of trivia.
JOHN BANVILLE
"14th time lucky", The Guardian, October 12, 2005
I don't think any novelist is happy being just a novelist. I'm sure you know this. We should be poets. We should be composers and we should be making language do things that the novel won't allow you to do. This is what I've been trying to do for a long time.
JOHN BANVILLE
"Oblique dreamer", The Guardian, September 17, 2000
There are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I know seems to have fallen out of my mind like a shower of rain, and I am gripped for a moment in paralysed dismay, waiting for it all to come back but with no certainty that it will.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
I'm very much against the notion of the Great Man, the Great Figure who is telling us all how to behave. Writers are just like other people, except slightly more obsessed.
JOHN BANVILLE
"14th time lucky", The Guardian, October 12, 2005