Irish novelist (1945- )
It had to be a woman, naturally. The room seems to be swelling around her, as if it were indeed a tent, billowing and burgeoning as it fills up with more and more thickening, unbreathable air.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Infinities
Irish English is a very different beast from English English or American English. Very different. The way in which Irish writers are only too happy to infuse their language with ambiguity is very different. An English writer will try to be clear. Orwell said that good prose should be like a pane of glass. The Irish writer would say: 'No no, it's a lens, it distorts everything.'
JOHN BANVILLE
"Oblique dreamer", The Guardian, September 17, 2000
I used to think that age would bring wisdom. It doesn't, it just brings confusion. But I find that this confusion is artistically useful. It's a kind of progression, a negative progression. It's moving into areas that you didn't know were there. It becomes more dreamlike all the time.
JOHN BANVILLE
"Oblique dreamer", The Guardian, September 17, 2000
The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Paris Review, spring 2009
This is a problem for Irish writers--our literary forebears are enormous. They stand behind us like Easter Island statues, and we keep trying to measure up to them, leaping towards heights we can’t possibly reach. I suppose that’s a good thing, but it makes for a painful early life for the writer.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Paris Review, spring 2009
These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses. It is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
The fifties was the last great age of queerdom. All the talk now is of freedom and pride (pride!), but there young hotheads in their pink bell-bottoms, clamouring for the right to do it in the streets if they feel like it, do not seem to appreciate, or at least seem to wish to deny, the aphrodisiac properties of secrecy and fear.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Untouchable
The tea-bag is a vile invention suggestive to my perhaps overly squeamish eye of something a careless person might leave behind unflushed in the lavatory.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea