"Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces—brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc. — are hinged together with the subtlety of a child's Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy. The politics of the book is banal, of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party, before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew. There are good things here, for instance the scene when Perowne visits his senile mother in an old-folks' home, in which the writing is genuinely affecting in its simplicity and empathetic force. Overall, however, Saturday has the feel of a neoliberal polemic gone badly wrong; if Tony Blair — who makes a fleeting personal appearance in the book, oozing insincerity — were to appoint a committee to produce a "novel for our time," the result would surely be something like this."

“There had been rain but it had stopped, and the light from a luminously clouded sky was pewter-bright, and puddles on the road were shivering in the wind, and the rooks above the trees in St Anne's Park were being tossed about the air like scraps of charred paper.”

“he older I get the more I realise that the world is not as varied as we thought it was when we were young. Most places are much alike.”

“My present study - a word that always makes me uneasy, I am not sure why - is a small apartment in a huge, anonymous, quadrilateral block in Dublin city centre. My window, the one I do not look out of, gives on to a courtyard where no one ever goes, and where the silence is day-long and almost pastoral. When I first began to come here to work, a dozen years ago, I used to shut my door on entering each morning and put the chain on. The place is clean, or cleanish, and, yes, well lighted. Here I am unassailable. Or so I like to imagine.”

“When I stand up from my writing desk, "John Banville", or "Benjamin Black" – that is, the one whose name will appear on the title page – vanishes on the instant, since he only existed while the writing was being done.”

“I always thought when I got older that I'd be jealous of my children but I'm not. It's the opposite. I love seeing their possibilities. Nothing makes me as happy as sitting at dinner with loved ones, having a glass of wine with a meal that I've cooked. What could be better?”

“I write in what we call Hiberno-English, and it would be disastrous to lose my literary accent, as both Joyce and Beckett began to do in exile. In their case the unique tone of voice they each unwittingly adopted only made for a deeper poetic intensity; I suspect if I were to undergo a similar loss the result would not be so productive.”