John Banville

When I started writing, I was a great rationalist and believed I was absolutely in control. But the older one gets, the more confused, and for an artist I think that is quite a good thing: you allow in more of your instinctual self; your dreams, fantasies and memories. It's richer, in a way.

When young writers approach me for advice, I remind them, as gently as I can, that they are on their own, with no help available anywhere. Which is how it should be.

With the crime novels, it's delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. It's like having a fictitious family.

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

I like ideas. I find them more exciting than human behavior for the most part.

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

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.

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.

All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself.

In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.

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.

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.