John Banville

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.

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

I suppose it's possible that a writer would have feeling for his characters, but I can't see how, because writing is such a meticulous, intricate, technical business. I wish I could say that I love my characters and that frequently they take over the book and run away with the plot and so on. But they don't exist.

We artists love to talk tough, but we're just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it.

I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.

You know, artists don't really have all that much experience of life. We make a huge amount out of the small experience that we do have.

Life is tragic but it's equally comic.

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

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.

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 know some of my memories are made up and they are far more powerful than the things that actually happened. For example, I always remember my brother posting me a copy of 'Dubliners' from Africa, but he says he never did.