John Banville

“You can't write about fantasy without being ridiculous.”

“Death is such a strange thing. One minute you're here and then just gone. You'd think there would be an anteroom, a place where you could be visited before you go.”

“My work is frequently described as cold, which is baffling, since it seems to me embarrassingly, shame-makingly, scandalously warm. I find my work filled with sentiment, and I can't imagine why people find it cold.”

“If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.”

“The dead are my dark matter, filling up impalpably the empty spaces of the world.”

“We writers are shy, nocturnal creatures. Push us into the light and the light blinds us.”

“How I envy writers who can work on aeroplanes or in hotel rooms. On the run I can produce an article or a book review, or even a film script, but for fiction I must have my own desk, my own wall with my own postcards pinned to it, and my own window not to look out of.”

“We're constantly losing - we're losing time, we're losing ourselves. I don't feel for the things I lost.”

“I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.”

“I want my art to make people look at the world in a new way. I mean, what's the point of the art of writing if it doesn't take you into the mysterious?”

“I live in Dublin, God knows why. There are greatly more congenial places I could have settled in - Italy, France, Manhattan - but I like the climate here, and Irish light seems to be essential for me and for my writing.”

“All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.”

“We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.”

“I am the worst judge of my books.”

“I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.”

“I have this fantasy. I'm walking past a bookshop and I click my fingers and all my books go blank. So I can start again and get it right.”

“Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don't do well, in the hope of learning.”

“I sometimes think that I might be slightly autistic. There might be a syndrome that hasn't been named. I don't seem to see the world in the same way that most people I know see it. They don't seem to be baffled by it.”

“I don't see how English as we use it in Europe can be revivified. It's like Latin must have been in about A.D. 300, tired and used up. All one can do is press very hard stylistically to make it glow.”

“Office life is very, very strange. It's like no other way of living. You have an intimacy with people who you work with in the office, yet if you meet them on the streets, you both look the other way because you're embarrassed.”