Irish novelist (1945- )
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
When darkness sifts from the air like fine soft soot and light spreads slowly out of the east then all but the most wretched of humankind rally.
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
Of all the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works. When darkness sifts from the air like fine soft soot and light spreads slowly out of the east then all but the most wretched of humankind rally.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Infinities
None of this means anything. Anything of significance, that is. I am just amusing myself, musing, losing myself in a welter of words. For words in here are a form of luxury, of sensuousness, they are all we have been allowed to keep of the rich, wasteful world from which we are shut away.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Book of Evidence
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
To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Untouchable
When I was a child and heard about angels, I was both frightened and fascinated by the thought of these enormous, invisible presences in our midst. I conceived of them not as white-robed androgynes with yellow locks and thick gold wings, which was how my friend Matty Wilson had described them to me--Matty was the predecessor of all sorts of arcane knowledge--but as big, dark, blundering men, massive in their weightlessness, given to pranks and ponderous play, who might knock you over, or break you in half, without meaning to. When a child from Miss Molyneaux's infant school in Carrickdrum fell under the hoofs of a dray-horse one day and was trampled to death, I, a watchful six year old, knew who was to blame; I pictured his guardian angel standing over the child's crushed form with his big hands helplessly extended, not sure whether to be contrite or to laugh.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Untouchable
I don't think any novelist is happy being just a novelist. I'm sure you know this. We should be poets. We should be composers and we should be making language do things that the novel won't allow you to do. This is what I've been trying to do for a long time.
JOHN BANVILLE
"Oblique dreamer", The Guardian, September 17, 2000
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
And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
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
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 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
This is the only way another creature can be known: on the surface, that's where there is depth.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Book of Evidence
I shall be delivered, like a noble closing speech. I shall be, in a word, said.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
Who speaks? It is her voice, in my head. I fear it will not stop until I stop. It talks to me as I haul myself along these cobbled streets, telling me things I do not want to hear. Sometimes I answer, protest aloud, demanding to be left in peace.
JOHN BANVILLE
Shroud
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
Never kept a journal before. Fear of incrimination.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Untouchable