Quote of the Day (John Banville, on the Novel’s ‘Peculiar Contract’ With the Reader)

“One of the oddest aspects of the novel is the peculiar contract that it forges — how wonderfully ambiguous is the English language — between itself and the reader. Why are they believed, these cunningly fashioned lies? Sancho Panza, Emma Bovary, Leopold Bloom, these artefacts, conjured out of words, can seem more real to us than the person sitting opposite us at the breakfast table. What could be stranger? We are all children, longing for a story at bedtime, happy to suspend our disbelief for the sake of the fun.”— Irish novelist-memoirist John Banville, “Where Great Novels Come From,” The Financial Times, Sept. 2-3, 2023

Photo of John Banville taken May 10, 2019, by Jindrich Nosek (NoJin).

Quote of the Day (John Banville, on Past and Present)

“The present is where we live, while the past is where we dream.” — Irish novelist-memoirist John Banville, Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir (2018)

Photo of John Banville taken May 10, 2019, by Jindrich Nosek (NoJin).

Quote of the Day (John Banville, on Irish as a Reaction to ‘The Language of the Colonist’)

“If English is the language of the colonist -- one of the first words Crusoe taught Friday to speak was ‘Master’ -- lending itself to directness and clarity and well-suited to the imperative mode, Irish is an altogether different tongue, convoluted in its grammar and syntax, onomatopoeic rather than descriptive, and oblique to the point of evasiveness. Certain straightforward statements of fact are impossible in Irish: For instance, one cannot say ‘I am a man’ but must use a formulation that roughly translates as ‘I am in my manness.’ It is a language the fluid structures and formulaic elaborations of which seek to apprehend reality not by the narrational method of standard English but in the manner of a fine-meshed yet amorphous net thrown over the stubbornly solid objects that make up the commonplace world.”—Irish novelist John Banville, “Living in Irish, Writing in English,” The Washington Post, Sept. 19, 1999, reprinted in The Writing Life: Writers On How They Think and Work, edited by Marie Arana (2003)

Photo of John Banville taken May 10, 2019, by Jindrich Nosek (NoJin).