All I wanted was to be left alone. They abhor a vacuum, other people. You find a quiet corner where you can hunker down in peace, and the next minute there they are, crowding around you in their party hats, tooting their paper whistles in your face and insisting you get up and join in the knees-up.
John Banville...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
John BanvilleArt is amoral, whether we accept this or not; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.
John BanvilleAnd indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
John BanvilleHow flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.
John Banville