Irish novelist (1945- )
How deceptively light they are, the truly decisive steps we take in life.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Untouchable
I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Untouchable
Time and age have brought not wisdom, as they are supposed to do, but confusion, and a broadening incomprehension, each year laying down another ring of nesience.
JOHN BANVILLE
Shroud
What is it about the past? I can never understand it. Why is it so powerful? Why does it appeal to us as if it had some extraordinary pearl of meaning that we can't find in our present lives?
JOHN BANVILLE
"Oblique dreamer", The Guardian, September 17, 2000
Ambiguity is the essence of Irish writing, I think.
JOHN BANVILLE
"Oblique dreamer", The Guardian, September 17, 2000
He knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minuscule absence, a barely detective gap in the so-called grand scheme, one unit fewer now. Or not even that, not even an empty space where he once was, for all will rush immediately to fill that vacuum. Pft. Gone. Recollections of him will remain in the minds of others for a while, but presently those others too will die and his few relics with them. And then all will be dark.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Infinities
It is hard for anyone who has not given himself wholeheartedly to a belief (and I say again, Miss V., that is how it is: you give yourself to it, it does not fall upon you like sanctifying grace from Heaven) to appreciate how the believer's conscious mind can separate itself into many compartments containing many, conflicting, dogmas. These are not sealed compartments; they are like the cells of a battery (I think this is how a battery works), over which the electrical charge plays, leaping from one cell to another, gathering force and direction as it goes. You put in the acid of world-historical necessity and the distilled water of pure theory and connect up your points and with a flash and a shudder the patched-together monster of commitment, sutures straining and ape brow clenched, rises in jerky slow motion from Dr. Diabolo's operating table.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Untouchable
We writers are shy, nocturnal creatures. Push us into the light and the light blinds us.
JOHN BANVILLE
"14th time lucky", The Guardian, October 12, 2005
Dogs are dim creatures, do not speak to me of their good sense--have you ever heard of a team of tomcats hauling a sled across the frozen wastes?
JOHN BANVILLE
The Infinities
And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
I think I am becoming my own ghost.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
First day of the new life. Very strange. Feeling almost skittish all day. Exhausted now yet feverish also, like a child at the end of a party. Like a child, yes: as if I had suffered a grotesque form of rebirth.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Untouchable
The notion haunts me that I am being given one last chance to redeem something of myself. I am not speaking of the soul, I am not that far gone in my dotage. But there may be some small, precious thing that I can buy back, as once I bought back Mama Vander's silver pill-box from the pawnbroker's.
JOHN BANVILLE
Shroud
I have ever had the conviction, resistant to all rational considerations, that at some unspecified future moment the continuous rehearsal which is my life, with its so many misreadings, is slips and fluffs, will be done with and that the real drama for which I have ever and with earnestness been preparing will at last begin. It is a common delusion.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
I would have made her a part of me. If I could, I would have had a notch cut in my already aging side and a slip of her, my young rose, inserted there and lashed to me with twine.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Infinities
Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
Never kept a journal before. Fear of incrimination.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Untouchable
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
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