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John Banville Biography

William John Banville (born 8 December 1945), who sometimes writes as Benjamin Black, is an Irish novelist, adapter of dramas, and screenwriter. Recognised for his precise, cold, forensic prose style, Nabokovian inventiveness, and for the dark humour of his generally arch narrators, Banville is considered to be "one of the most imaginative literary novelists writing in the English language today." He has been described as "the heir to Proust, via Nabokov."

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John Banville Quotes

I dont know if there is a personal identity. We all imagine that we are absolute individuals. But when we begin to look for where this individuality resides, its very difficult to find.

Absolute, Identity, Individuality, Looks

Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.

Art, Cold, Doe, Fiction, Take

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

Live In The Present, Living, Past, Present, Think, Thinking

What is money, after all? Almost nothing, when one has a sufficiency of it.

Money, Nothing, Sufficiency

No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.

Equals, Scandal, Science, Sign, Things, Two

In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.

Book, Concentrate, Hard Work, High, Quite, Rewards

We artists love to talk tough, but we're just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it.

Artist, Artists, Down, Sentimental, Tough

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.

Childhood, Marvellously, New Experiences, Polished, Self, Taking

Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.

Follow, Hand, Hands, Hold, Managed

The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.

Big, Book, Books, Prize, Should, Way

In the city of flesh I travel without maps, a worried tourist: and Ottilie was a very Venice. I stumbled lost in the blue shade of her pavements. Here was a dreamy stillness, a swaying, the splash of an oar. Then, when I least expected it, suddenly I stepped out into the great square, the sunlight, and she was a flock of birds scattering with soft cries in my arms.

Cities, Flock, Splash, Squares, Stumbled, Venice

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.

Ask, Civilization, Godliness, Long, Writing

I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.

Critical, Read, Reviewers, Simply, Would Be

Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.

Dead, Dresses, Nightly, Rehearsal, Sleep

That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business.

Hate, Hideously, I Hate, Life

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s devoted Beckett readers greeted each successively shorter volume from the master with a mixture of awe and apprehensiveness; it was like watching a great mathematician wielding an infinitesimal calculus, his equations approaching nearer and still nearer to the null point.

Approaching, Like, Math, Mixtures, Null, Successively

And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.

Happened, Indifference, Momentous, Nothing, World

The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.

Language, Mesh, Pushed, Real, World

With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.

Book, Crime Novels, Delightful, Novels, Protagonists

Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.

Believe, Created, God, Impiety, World, Would Be

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