John Banville Quotes

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

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.

I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 suppose it's possible that a writer would have feeling for his characters, but I can't see how, because writing is such a meticulous, intricate, technical business. I wish I could say that I love my characters and that frequently they take over the book and run away with the plot and so on. But they don't exist.

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.

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

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