Irish novelist (1945- )
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
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
I think I am becoming my own ghost.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Sea
Her letter was delivered to me one morning a world ago in the pleasant town of Arcady by a helmed and goggled Hermes on a bike. The message it carried was one I had been waiting for and dreading all my life, what I think of as my life, my real life. Now it had come at last, and the first thing I felt was embarassment. It was as if I had been informed that a long-dead sibling, hardly remembered and never loved, was not dead after all, but tritely and vigorously alive, residing in a neighbouring suburb and about to pay an impossible visit. What could I find to say, at such a distance of time, to this discarded version of myself? I drank whisky all day, euphoric with terror and panic, and woke up at dead of night to find myself slumped in the old swivel chair down in my study with a burnt-out cigarette stub still in my fingers.
JOHN BANVILLE
Shroud
Gradually now he is becoming aware of something he cannot identify, a tremor that is all around, as if the air itself were quaking. It grows more intense. Alarmed, he takes a soft step backwards into the protective dimness of the room. Clearly he can hear the sluggish thudding of his heart. A part of his mind knows what is happening but it is not the part that thinks. Everything is atremble now. Some small mechanism behind him in the room--he does not look, but it must be a clock--sets up in its innards an urgent, silvery tinkling. The floorboards creak in trepidation. Then from the left the thing appears, huge, blunt-headed, nudging its way blindly forward, and rolls to a shuddering halt and stands there in front of the trees, gasping clouds of steam.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Infinities
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
Never kept a journal before. Fear of incrimination.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Untouchable
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
Ambiguity is the essence of Irish writing, I think.
JOHN BANVILLE
"Oblique dreamer", The Guardian, September 17, 2000
We're all the people in our books. A few people who read Eclipse in manuscript said that they felt almost embarrassed because it seemed to be so personal. I suppose, in a way, it should be gratifying but I find it puzzling. I certainly didn't set out to write about myself. Physically, I'm entirely different from Cleave. I don't have the same attitudes - but maybe I did.
JOHN BANVILLE
"Oblique dreamer", The Guardian, September 17, 2000
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
He made the mistake of imagining that his possessions were a measure of his own worth, and strutted and crowed, parading his things like a schoolboy with a champion catapult.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Book of Evidence