Irish novelist (1945- )
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
This love, this mortal love, is of their own making ... the thing we did not intend, foresee or sanction. How then should it not fascinate us?... It is as if a fractious child had been handed a few timber shavings and a bucket of mud to keep him quiet only for him promptly to erect a cathedral.... Within the precincts of this consecrated house they afford each other sanctuary, excuse each other their failings, their sweats and smells, their lies and subterfuges, above all their ineradicable self-obsession. This is what baffles us, how they wriggled out of our grasp and somehow became free to forgive each other for all that they are not.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Infinities
I reached for the bottle on the desk and drank greedily from the neck, making suckling noises. My mouth was raw from the long day's drinking. When I let my arm sweep down beside the chair the bottle slipped from my fingers and rolled with a joggling hesitancy on the polished wooden floor, pouring its heart out in lavish, gottal gulps. Let it spill. In truth, I dislike the smoke-and-ashes taste of bourbon, but early on I had fixed on it to be my drink, as part of my strategy of difference, another way of being on guard, as an actor puts a pebble in his shoe to remind him that the character he is playing has a limp.
JOHN BANVILLE
Shroud
I think I am becoming my own ghost.
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
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
Never kept a journal before. Fear of incrimination.
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
How quickly the time goes as the season advances, the earth hurtling along its groove into the years's sharply descending final arc.
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
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
Ambiguity is the essence of Irish writing, I think.
JOHN BANVILLE
"Oblique dreamer", The Guardian, September 17, 2000
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
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
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
Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
I shall be delivered, like a noble closing speech. I shall be, in a word, said.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
My mother was afraid of the books I wrote, afraid of what she would discover if she read them.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Paris Review, spring 2009