Irish novelist (1945- )
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
Time and age have brought not wisdom, as they are supposed to do, but confusion, and a broadening incomprehension, each year laying down another ring of nesience.
JOHN BANVILLE
Shroud
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
To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Untouchable
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
I would have made her a part of me. If I could, I would have had a notch cut in my already aging side and a slip of her, my young rose, inserted there and lashed to me with twine.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Infinities
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
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
Never kept a journal before. Fear of incrimination.
JOHN BANVILLE
The Untouchable
Ambiguity is the essence of Irish writing, I think.
JOHN BANVILLE
"Oblique dreamer", The Guardian, September 17, 2000
I think I am becoming my own ghost.
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
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
I shall be delivered, like a noble closing speech. I shall be, in a word, said.
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
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
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
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