Stuart Jeffries, “John Banville: A Life in Writing,” The Guardian (Guardian Review p. 12), 30 June 2012.

Banville once said of his books that “I hate them all”. Is that affectation? “They embarrass me because they’re all failures. We’re aiming for perfection and never attain it. It’s become a cliché but, as Beckett wrote, ‘Fail again. Fail better.’ What one does is so little compared to one’s ambitions for it.”