Benjamin Black is a craftsman and these are crafted works. I'm very proud of them. I think they're well made, but Banville is doing something else – … - John Banville

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Benjamin Black is a craftsman and these are crafted works. I'm very proud of them. I think they're well made, but Banville is doing something else – he's trying to make a kind of poetry, I suppose. I'm a perfectionist. It's an illness but a good illness. It's a completely different method of writing. Banville writes with a fountain pen on paper in a manuscript book and Black works straight on to the screen. It could take me a whole morning to write a few sentences as Banville, but as Black I'd be very annoyed if I didn't have at least two or three pages done. This drives crime-writers crackers because they think I'm saying that their craft is not worth it. I'm simply saying it's a different thing. I don't know why they worry when I talk about speed; after all, Georges Simenon wrote his books in about 10 days.

English
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About John Banville

John Banville (born 8 December 1945) is an Irish novelist and journalist. He is recognised for his precise, cold, forensic prose style, Nabokovian inventiveness, and for the dark humour of his generally arch narrators. His stated ambition is to give his prose "the kind of denseness and thickness that poetry has".

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Benjamin Black William John Banville

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Additional quotes by John Banville

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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