John Banville (interviewed by Ben Ehrenreich)

From The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers by Vendela Vida (Editor), ©2005 Believer Books (www.books.believermag.com)

JB: "... I'm constantly astonished by the world. I have been since childhood and have never gotten used to it.

" I'm sitting here looking at clouds going across the sky. Clouds have always fascinated me. They seem the most unreal things. Skies always look to me like things out of a science fiction movie. And yet I've been looking at skies for the past fifty-seven years. I should've got used to them by now, but I'm not. I look at people in the same way. People do the most extraordinary, outlandish, bizarre things quite ordinarily. I've always felt that if you were a Martian and you came to earth, and you'd coped with everything—half the population scraping its face with a blade every morning and things like that—and thought you had it all down pat, and then somebody sneezes, or somebody yawns and stretches their arms in that sort of silent howl. You'd say, 'Oh no, I've got to go back and rethink this whole thing. Obviously these human beings are far stranger than I thought they were.'..."

BE: "I suppose there's a real Martian quality to childhood."