Dead Cats and Slime

  Great interview with John Banville in the Guardian yesterday, full of rueful wisdom.
  On the writing process: 'When you're writing there's a deep deep level of concentration way below your normal self. This strange voice, these strange sentences come out of you. When I was young I thought I was in control of everything. Now I realise it's much more a process of dreaming."
   On hating his own novels: "They embarrass me because they're all failures...The only person who can't read (my own) book is me because I bring to it all the history, all the dead cats and slime and that Tuesday afternoon when you said 'Fuck it' and you let the paragraph go."
   On ageing: "A friend of mine visited Beckett in his old folks' home in Paris and he said he was getting so old he was forgetting so many things. My friend sympathised and Beckett said ' No, no - its wonderful!' I know what he means : so much trivia gets wiped."