John Banville Quotes

Every time I get a script it's a matter of trying to know what I could do with it. I see colors, imagery. It has to have a smell. It's like falling in love. You can't give a reason why.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

The actor creates with his own flesh and blood all those things which all the arts try in some way to describe.

Drawing is giving a performance; an artist is an actor who is not limited by the body, only by his ability and, perhaps, experience.

To create a work of art is to create the world.

Writers can take offense when someone asks what's real or autobiographical in our work because, to us, that's not what counts. The bits taken from life are tiny scales on the dragon's tail - what about that whole beautiful writhing, fire-breathing dragon?

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

I think writers like to see how people bring their words to life, and it's always surprising. Always, no matter what, whether it's good or bad, it's always surprising because a whole human being is coming to that piece of writing.

When you're an actor or any kind of artist, you use your life as something to draw from in every experience.

I paint what I see, not what a camera would see.

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.

You have to live what you write, or you have to know it. There are exceptions, like story songs, where you just have to have your facts straight. But I think you don't have to live a hard life to be a good or interesting songwriter.

I think a valid approach to being a musician is to take all of the experience of your life and filter it through your personality and send it back out there, and that's what art is.

I guess artists are living inspiration. There's something very pure about a person that fantasizes. I like hearing their stories, watching them work. Their take on the world interests me. It's not unified.

Lyrical poets have to be in touch with visceral experience. I've always tried to avoid virtual experiences. That's emerging in my fiction.

When I say art influences me, which it does, it's not at all in a literal form. You go and see exhibitions or collections or meet an artist. It's all a compilation. Every moment, at all times, all this information. Then all this information disappears, and it shows up later in the process.

So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.

You know, there's a saying in art that in order to be universal you must be specific. So I think every artist feels that he is dealing with specific things but that it also has significance universally.

I think the great artists, especially in literature, have always thought with the heart.

Working with Tim Burton is like a psychic experience -Tim waves his hands and says, 'I don't know,' and you go home and do it. He's the most articulate nonverbal person in the world. He doesn't say a word, and you know exactly what it means.

Art is life's dream interpretation.

Poetry is that sentiment of the soul, or faculty of the mind, which enables its possessor to appreciate and realize the heights and depths of human experience. It is the power to feel pleasure or suffer pain in all its exquisiteness and intensity.