"THE RIGHT, THE EXACT, THE ONLY WORD"

John Banville is the 200th Art of Fiction interview at The Paris Review.

INTERVIEWER: Do you revise?

BANVILLE: When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it’s finished. A certain point comes at which you can’t do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence. The rhythm is set. The meaning is set. Occasionally I will leave behind a sentence that I know is missing a word, and I’ll go back to it later. I wrote a sentence like that yesterday. A man is talking about his wife, who’s