Category Archives: John Banville

Posted on October 10, 2013 | Leave a comment

In January 1922, as Kafka was embarking on the composition of The Castle, he arrived one snowy evening in the health resort of Spindelmühle in the Riesengebirge near the Polish border. At the Hotel Krone, where he was expected, he found he was listed in the hotel directory as ‘Dr Josef Kafka’.

— John Banville

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Posted in John Banville, Kafka

The great tornadoes of intuition

Posted on March 2, 2012 | Comments Off on The great tornadoes of intuition

We have waited a long time for an artist who is brave enough, is at ease enough with the great tornadoes of intuition, to grasp that the break with the outside world entails the break with the inside world, that there are no replacement relations for naive relations, that what are called outside and inside are one and the same.

— Beckett on Bram van Velde (via here)

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Posted in Beckett, Bram van Velde, John Banville

Do you really hate your own novels?

Posted on February 1, 2011 | Leave a comment

Q. Do you really hate your own novels?

A. Yes! I hate them. I mean that. Nobody believes me, but it’s true. They’re an embarrassment and a deep source of shame. They’re better than everybody else’s, of course, but not good enough for me. There is a great deal more pain than pleasure in writing fiction. It’s only now and then, maybe once every three or four days, that I manage to write a sentence in which I hear that wonderful harmonic chime that you get when, say, you flick the edge of a wine glass with a fingernail.

— John Banville

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Posted in John Banville