I don't know if there is a personal identity. We all imagine that we are absolute individuals. But when we begin to look for where this individuality resides, it's very difficult to find.
John BanvilleRead
All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the idea that while authors draw from their own experiences for inspiration, the act of writing fiction transforms those experiences into something distinct.
John Banville's quote highlights the paradox of autobiographical influences in fiction. While authors inevitably infuse their personal experiences into their characters and narratives, the essence of literary writing transcends mere autobiography; it becomes a crafted and imaginative act that creates a separate reality, allowing for exploration beyond the author's direct experiences.
Themes
AutobiographicalCharactersWritingLiteratureFiction
In practice
Example use cases
In a writing workshop, one might use this quote to discuss the balance between personal experience and fictional storytelling.
More from John Banville
All quotes →Why does the past seem so magical, so fraught, so luminous? At the time it was just, ugh, another boring bloody day. But, to look back on, it's a day full of miracles and light and extraordinary events. Why is this? What process do we apply to the past, to give it this vividness? I don't know.
John BanvilleRead
Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self.
John BanvilleRead
Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one's living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. I couldn't ask for anything better. It's as near to godliness as I can get.
John BanvilleRead
I know some of my memories are made up and they are far more powerful than the things that actually happened. For example, I always remember my brother posting me a copy of 'Dubliners' from Africa, but he says he never did.
John BanvilleRead
How I envy writers who can work on aeroplanes or in hotel rooms. On the run I can produce an article or a book review, or even a film script, but for fiction I must have my own desk, my own wall with my own postcards pinned to it, and my own window not to look out of.
John BanvilleRead
Similar quotes
I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.
Robert CaroRead
If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling. I don't want to open up my cornflakes and find that they're full of pebbles... You need to respect the reader enough not to call it something it isn't.
Margaret AtwoodRead
The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They repeat, they re-arrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, but with a singular change-that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, nonce, struck out.
Robert Louis StevensonRead
When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as 'Catch-22' I'm tempted to reply, 'Who has?'
Joseph HellerRead
With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.
David HalberstamRead
I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book - in short, it's something unworthy of a serious critic's attention.
Jennifer WeinerRead