I feel a kind of intellectual regret, not an emotional regret, at having left my parents and that world behind. But it's not a great weight on my sou… - John Banville

My books must be an absolute nightmare to translate. I wouldn't do it. I had a couple of them in Japanese some years ago and my wife met a Japanese woman who said that she had read the books. And she asked her what the translations were like. This woman said they were the worst translation she had ever read in her life. She said she didn't recognise the books when she finally read them in English.

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.

After all, who knows what the distant past was like? About Kepler and Copernicus, people often say, You captured the period so well! I always want to ask, How do you know? You weren't there either.