A Quote by John Banville
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.
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I've told youngsters not to write their autobiographical novel at the age of twenty-one; to save it for the time when they're fifty-one or sixty-one. They should write other novels first, to learn their craft; they shouldn't cut their teeth on the valuable material of childhood because they'll never have better material, ever, to work with.
Even if the experience in my stories is not autobiographical and the actual plot is not autobiographical, the emotion is always somewhat autobiographical. I think there's some of me in every one of the stories.
The First Man is completely autobiographical. The mother [Albert Camus] describes is the woman I knew, and she was exactly as he describes her. And this teacher really existed.
I think each album does have a different energy, otherwise you'd be doing the same thing again and not experimenting anew... Albums are such autobiographical material, not in the material but as an expression of what you're like at the time.
Like most filmmakers and writers, there are roots in my own life, but they are stories that I invent. There was a period of time in my life when I made directly autobiographical films where I truly told what happened to me. But, now, I don't make directly autobiographical films anymore. I am more for renouncing that and being in front of history. The large part of my work tells about something I know. It's close.
When I wrote my first book, 'The Tennis Party', my overriding concern was that I didn't write the autobiographical first novel. I was so, so determined not to write about a 24-year-old journalist. It was going to have male characters, and middle-aged people, so I could say, 'Look, I'm not just writing about my life, I'm a real author.'
In fact, writing, especially writing autobiographical works, and this is actually the fourth time I've done it, each time I've done it I've felt deeply immersed in the material as I'm doing it, and then it's over and everything is the same.
When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.
The mental state I'm in is completely different, but the act of trying to write is the same. I mean, in all instances you try to write good sentences. But in a novel you're free to do whatever you want, and in the autobiographical works you can't make things up.
Because of the wonderfully positive response to 'Life's That Way,' I am considering writing some more autobiographical stuff - maybe another book. I don't know. It doesn't help that I'm lazy.
It always seems to people that I'm avoiding saying, 'It's autobiographical,' but I really do believe that human beings make stories and they make themselves. If I told you the same story twelve years ago, I could have emphasized something different. The importance changes, the meaning of things shifts over time. Also, I think all art is autobiographical. Every endeavor is full of impressions of ourselves.
Over the years, I had something in principle against autobiographical writing altogether because memory plays tricks on us, and we also tend to reinvent ourselves. But there comes an age when one begins to observe life, and there are things that need time to mature, also in terms of literary form.
People ask, 'Are your things autobiographical?,' and I think, no, they're not autobiographical directly, but of course my life has informed my work.
I don't know who they are[my characters] . They're entirely invented characters. Maybe that's how I've been able to write so many books, because there are no boundaries for me. I can write a completely fantastical story like "Swept Away" or "Blinded by the Light" and then a non-comic drama like "Chicxulub" or something like "Birnam Wood" that has autobiographical underpinnings. Why not?
Look, anything any writer writes is going to be on some level autobiographical. Part of the funny/sad thing is that you don't always know how autobiographical you're being.
I use my fiction to explore my own unconscious issues. I usually don't even know what's going on with me until I'm writing. That doesn't mean my books are autobiographical.
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