Frasi di John Banville

John Banville è un romanziere e giornalista irlandese. Il suo romanzo La spiegazione dei fatti è stato candidato per il Booker Prize e ha vinto il premio Guinness Peat Aviation. Il suo diciottesimo romanzo, Il mare, ha vinto il Man Booker Prize nel 2005. Ha scritto cinque romanzi con lo pseudonimo di Benjamin Black.

Banville è conosciuto per la sua prosa precisa e fredda, caratterizzata da un'inventiva Nabokoviana, e per l'umorismo nero del suo spesso malizioso narratore. Ha dichiarato di voler dare alla sua prosa «il tipo di solidità e spessore che ha la poesia». Wikipedia

✵ 8. Dicembre 1945  •  Altri nomi Benjamin Black, جان بنویل

John Banville photo

Jindřich Nosek (NoJin), Own work / CC BY-SA 4.0

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Ghosts

John Banville

Ghosts

John Banville

John Banville: 103 citazioni1 Mi piace

John Banville frasi celebri

“Quello che accade non ha importanza; il momento è tutto. Questo è il mondo d'oro. Il pittore ha radunato il suo piccolo gruppo di persone e le ha poste in questa radura agitata dal vento, in questa delicata luce artificiale, dipingendole come angeli e pagliacci. È un mondo dove niente è perduto, dove di tutto è dato conto pur se il mistero delle cose è preservato; un mondo dove essi possono vivere, per quanto brevemente, per quanto tenuamente, nella sera affievolentesi dell'io, solitari e al tempo stesso insieme in qualche modo qui in questo luogo, morenti come sono, eppure fissi per sempre in un istante luminoso, eterno.”

John Banville libro Ghosts

Ghosts

“Tendo a non fare molto caso alle altre persone – l'ho già detto in precedenza, è uno dei miei difetti più gravi – e nelle rare occasioni in cui metto la testa fuori dal guscio e do una bella occhiata, quello che mi colpisce in modo strabiliante non è quanto siano diversi da me, ma quanto siano simili, malgrado tutto.”

John Banville libro Ghosts

Ghosts

“Nonostante la particolarità delle sue opere – quale altro scrittore ha modellato un panorama letterario così istantaneamente riconoscibile come il suo? – come artista Kafka generalmente viene visto come un foglio bianco.”

“Kafka senza dubbio si portava qualche oscuro turbamento nel profondo dell'animo.”

Origine: Dall'articolo Il mio Kafka segreto http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2013/10/21/il-mio-kafka-segreto.html, la Repubblica, 21 dicembre 2013.

“Sto leggendo Diderot anche riguardo agli attori e alla recitazione. Lui sapeva quanta vita passiamo a recitare una parte. Concepiva la vita come una forma di ipocrisia necessaria, in cui ciascuno recita la sua parte, fingendo di essere se stesso. È vero. Che altro sono mai stato se non un attore, seppur un cattivo attore, troppo coinvolto nel mio ruolo, non sufficientemente distaccato, non abbastanza freddo. Sì, sì, è così. Mi reputate freddo? Non lo sono. Crudo, forse, incurante della proprietà, troppo propenso agli scherzi di bassa lega, ma freddo no davvero, no. Proprio il contrario, anzi, caldo e sudato, in farsetto e calzabraca, cerco di non guardare le facce all'insù oltre le luci di scena, gli occhi avidi di disastro fissi su di me che incespico tra i miei compagni attori, balbettando le mie improbabili battute e saltandole del tutto nei momenti clou. Per questo non ho mai imparato a vivere come si deve in mezzo agli altri. La gente mi trova strano. Be’, io stesso mi trovo strano. Nono sono convincente, in qualche modo, neppure per me stesso. “L'uomo che ambisce a commuovere la folla dev'essere un attore che impersona se stesso”. È così, è davvero così? Ho trovato il bandolo? E sì che per tutto il tempo avevo creduto fossero gli altri che dovevo immaginarmi di far vivere. Bene bene. Questa ha l'aria di una grande scoperta. Dev'essere di certo un'illusione.”

John Banville libro Ghosts

Ghosts

“Nonostante la particolarità delle sue opere – quale altro scrittore ha modellato un panorama letterario così istantaneamente riconoscibile come il suo?”

come artista Kafka generalmente viene visto come un foglio bianco.

John Banville: Frasi in inglese

“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”

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John Banville The Sea

Origine: The Sea (2005, ISBN 0-330-48328-5.

“We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.”

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John Banville The Sea

Origine: The Sea

“Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.”

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John Banville The Sea

Origine: The Sea

“Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.”

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John Banville The Sea

Origine: The Sea

“In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.”

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“When I won the Booker Prize, I said that it was nice to see a work of art winning this prize and I've never been forgiven for that. When you get a prize, you're suppose to be humble. Somebody was interviewing me and said, 'This is a great day for Ireland'. I said, 'Why? Ireland didn't do it, I did it.' I wasn't forgiven for that either. I don't wear the green jersey and I don't hobnob with Michael D in the Park, although I quite like Michael D.”

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John Banville: Who cares whodunnit? (2013)

“Fiction is just a constant torment, and an embarrassment. I loathe my fiction. I have a fantasy when I'm passing a bookstore that I could click my fingers and all my books would go blank, so that I could start again and get them right.”

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John Banville, The Art of Fiction No. 200 (2009)

“My friends tell me I must stop saying in public that I ‘hate all my novels’. What I mean is that I am profoundly dissatisfied with everything I have done simply because it is not good enough by my standards. But my standard is perfection, and as we know, perfection is not allowed to such as us. On the other hand, I begin every new book in the complete conviction that this time, this time I shall get it right. Rationally I know this will not be so, but art has its reasons.”

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Fully Booked: Q & A with John Banville (2012)

“The force of the idea was such that I drew the car to the side of the road and stopped and, for some reason, laughed. It was a loud laugh, unsteady, and sounded, even to my own ears, slightly maniacal. Thinking back now, I realise it was less a laugh than the birth-cry of my dark and twin brother Benjamin Black.”

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John Banville on the birth of his dark twin, Benjamin Black (2011)

“I hesitate to talk about Czech food. […] The people are very sweet, wonderfully cultured, very friendly, but my God how they eat that food I do not know. It is surely the most disgusting cuisine in the world.”

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John Banville: Using words to paint pictures of "magical" Prague (2006)

“I'm doing my best to not be too rude about it, but oh my God that Czech food…”

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John Banville: Using words to paint pictures of "magical" Prague (2006)

“I suppose many people in Ireland would regard me as being more a European writer than an Irish writer. I don't think this is so.”

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John Banville: claiming Kafka as an Irish writer (2011)

“The first thought that occurred to me, that night when I heard the chairman of the jury announce my name, was, Just think how many people hate me at this moment. Naturally, I wanted to annoy those people even further by being arrogant.”

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About the Man Booker Prize
John Banville, The Art of Fiction No. 200 (2009)

“Coming from a tiny island, it's very exciting to be at sea in Central Europe in the sense of vast stretches of land all around one. We don't get that in Ireland.”

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John Banville: claiming Kafka as an Irish writer (2011)

“I don't know what citizens of Prague must feel about these endless lines of tourists tramping over their streets.”

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John Banville: claiming Kafka as an Irish writer (2011)

“A book at the very start comes to me as a nebulous geometric form, a kind of tension in space that has to be resolved. The resolution is effected by fleshing out the form with character, plot, dialogue, etc. But the original structure perseveres throughout, even when, or perhaps especially when, I am not conscious of it being at work. Art is a mysterious business.”

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Fully Booked: Q & A with John Banville (2012)

“Let's not despise story-telling. Like all novelists, I have this low desire to tell people stories.”

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Oblique dreamer (2000)

“We cannot all afford a farm in Cuba or a suite at the George V in newly liberated Paris, and more often than not must strive to forge our clean, well-lighted sentences at a folding table wedged between the baby's cot and the dining table.”

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Writers' rooms: John Banville (2007)

“The older I get, the more confused I get. I used to think that age would bring wisdom. It doesn't, it just brings confusion. But I find that this confusion is artistically useful. It's a kind of progression, a negative progression. It's moving into areas that you didn't know were there. It becomes more dreamlike all the time. When I was starting out as a novelist, I would have been furious if anyone said to me that novels are dream-like or that they're doing things the novelist didn't know he was doing. Now, I find that it's absolutely true.”

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Oblique dreamer (2000)

“I like to dress conservatively because then the outrageous things you say are even more outrageous.”

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John Banville: Who cares whodunnit? (2013)

“I feel that over the past 15 years, there has been a steady move toward more populist work. I do feel - and of course I'm completely biased - that this year was a return to the better days of the 80s and early 90s. It was a very good short list and a decent jury; it didn't have any stand-up comedians or media celebs on it, and I think that's what the Man Booker prize should be. There are plenty of other rewards for middle-brow fiction. There should be one decent prize for [pause] real books.”

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14th time lucky (2005)

“Certain moments remain in the mind with such force and clearness that one suspects they must be invented; that they are not held in the memory but generated out of the imagination.”

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John Banville on the birth of his dark twin, Benjamin Black (2011)

“My present study - a word that always makes me uneasy, I am not sure why - is a small apartment in a huge, anonymous, quadrilateral block in Dublin city centre. My window, the one I do not look out of, gives on to a courtyard where no one ever goes, and where the silence is day-long and almost pastoral. When I first began to come here to work, a dozen years ago, I used to shut my door on entering each morning and put the chain on. The place is clean, or cleanish, and, yes, well lighted. Here I am unassailable. Or so I like to imagine.”

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Writers' rooms: John Banville (2007)

“I drive from home to my office, a small apartment on the river in the center of Dublin. I write there from 9 a. m. to lunchtime, I take a simple lunch—bread, cheese, nice cup of tea—work until 6 p. m., then home for dinner. Viewed from outside my head it is a singularly dull and uneventful day, but inside my head … aaah.”

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How I Write: John Banville on ‘Ancient Light,’ Nabokov, and Dublin (2012)

“I could have kept [writing "Irish" novels such as Birchwood] and probably had a good deal more success than I did, especially on this side of the Atlantic. But you have to try to do many things. You have to try to do things that you actually think you're incapable of.”

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Once More Admired Than Bought, A Writer Finally Basks in Success (1990)

“One must try to keep a sensible perspective and not take oneself too seriously.”

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Fully Booked: Q & A with John Banville (2012)

“Ambiguity is the essence of Irish writing, I think.”

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Oblique dreamer (2000)

“Wodehouse is very interesting. There must be all kinds of darknesses in that man's life.”

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Oblique dreamer (2000)

“[On The Sea being filmed] It's not a blockbuster and it's not going to earn half a billion in the first weekend, but it's a work of art and I'm very pleased with it.”

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John Banville: Who cares whodunnit? (2013)

“If they give me the bloody prize, why can't they say nice things about me?”

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John Banville http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/10/johnbanville?INTCMP=SRCH, The Guardian (22 July 2008).

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