And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
John BanvilleWhen I finish a sentence, after much labor, it's finished. A certain point comes at which you can't do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence.
John BanvillePoetry is that magic which consists in awakening sensations with the help of a combination of sounds ... that sorcery by which ideas are necessarily communicated to us, in a definite way, by words which nevertheless do not express them.
John BanvilleFor 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.
John Banville