John Banville

One must try to keep a sensible perspective and not take oneself too seriously.

All art is to some extent shaped by what has gone before. But that is an organic process, not a conscious intention. Novels are made out of novels as much as they are out of life.

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

[T]he older I get the more I realise that the world is not as varied as we thought it was when we were young. Most places are much alike.

We all yearn in our hearts to be Larkin's "shit in the shuttered chateau", but few of us achieve that grand apotheosis.

The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.

A book at the very start comes to me as a nebulous geometric form, a kind of tension in space that has to be resolved. The resolution is effected by fleshing out the form with character, plot, dialogue, etc. But the original structure perseveres throughout, even when, or perhaps especially when, I am not conscious of it being at work. Art is a mysterious business.

So vivid is my recollection of the birth of Benjamin Black that surely, I feel, a cunning artificer has been at work, fashioning a surreally realistic picture of something that happened quite differently from what I seem to remember. Consider that light falling on the sea, how effulgent and steady it is; consider the trees, improbably full-leafed for the time of year – and look at those birds! Has Madam Memory really such a piercing eye for detail, are her powers of recall so comprehensive?

When I was young, art for me was a new religion. Now I see the aims and ends of art as less grand. If I can catch the play of light on a wall, and catch it just so, that is enough for me. I don’t want to write about human behavior. Art now seems to me in many ways the absolute opposite of psychology. It’s simply saying, This is how it is. This is how it looks, how it feels. To describe things well is far more worthwhile than the kind of cheap psychologizing, or even expensive psychologizing, that the novel so often indulges in.

March in Ireland can be a very lovely month, if you like your air rain-washed and your light wind-shaken.

There is something slightly sinister about Prague, just as there is about Lyon and Turin.

[Julian Gough's] notion that shouting the word 'feck' – Father Ted has a lot to answer for – and being grossly scatological will make him seem echt Irish only harms his argument. We who were born and continue to live in Ireland are always distressed by the stage-Irish antics so often to be encountered among the sons and daughters of the diaspora. But it is true, as the critic Declan Kiberd remarks, that no contemporary Irish writer has yet attempted the Great Irish Novel on social and political themes. Where is our Middlemarch, our Doctor Zhivago, our Rabbit trilogy? The fact is Irish fiction tends to be poetic rather than prosaic, which is something that non-Irish reviewers find hard to grasp. John McGahern used to say that there is verse and there is prose, and then there is poetry, and poetry can occur in either form, and that in Ireland it occurs more often in prose than in verse. There may be a grittily realistic novelist even now writing a masterpiece such as Mr Gough says he longs for, and, if so, I applaud her/him.

I hesitate to talk about Czech food. [...] The people are very sweet, wonderfully cultured, very friendly, but my God how they eat that food I do not know. It is surely the most disgusting cuisine in the world.

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 would have failed, of course, but failure is the condition of the artist's life. What kind of failure would I have enjoyed, suffered? I know it was not all waste. My hopeless daubings taught me to look at the world with a painter's eye, despite the poor connection between eye and hand. And the smells of turpentine and linseed oil and paint-soaked rags still make my blood tingle. But words were my calling, and called to me, and I let fall the brush.

Irish stylist springs Booker surprise [...] A 7-1 outsider in the betting odds and untipped by virtually any critic [...] The veteran Irish stylist John Banville brought off one of the biggest literary coups last night when he took the ?50,000 Booker Prize from under the noses of the bookies and the literary insiders.

There had been rain but it had stopped, and the light from a luminously clouded sky was pewter-bright, and puddles on the road were shivering in the wind, and the rooks above the trees in St Anne's Park were being tossed about the air like scraps of charred paper.

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.

Interviewer: What would you like carved onto your tombstone? Banville: I'd rather not have a tombstone.

My wife says I had a nervous breakdown during the writing of Mefisto. Maybe I did, but what's a nervous breakdown for a writer? For a writer every day is a nervous breakdown. [...] The book came out in the spring, and I remember I spent that following summer digging my garden — Voltaire would have been proud. I made a wonderful garden. Grew beans, lettuces. I was healing myself from some kind of traumatic process that I don't pretend to understand. All right, let's agree with my wife and call it a nervous breakdown.