John Banville Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

“Writers are just like other people, except slightly more obsessed.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“When you're writing there's a deep, deep level of concentration way below your normal self. This strange voice, these strange sentences come out of you.”

“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've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist - I'd put novelist last.”

“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.”

“I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.”

“It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.”