Irish novelist (1945- )
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
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
To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Untouchable
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
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 think I am becoming my own ghost.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
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
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
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
Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.
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
When you have once seen the chaos, you must make some thing to set between yourself and that terrible sight; and so you make a mirror, thinking that in it shall be reflected the reality of the world; but then you understand that the mirror reflects only appearances, and that reality is somewhere else, off behind the mirror; and then you remember that behind the mirror there is only the chaos.
JOHN BANVILLE
Doctor Copernicus
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
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
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
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
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
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
Guilt is the only affect I know of that does not diminish with time.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Untouchable