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All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.

John Banville

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John Banville
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Entertained
Entertainment
Tragedy
Level
Levels
Art
Certain
Sophocles

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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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Ian McEwan is a very good writer the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.
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The trouble with you, Vic, he said, is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.
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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.
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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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The effect of prizes on one's career - if that is what to call it - is considerable, since they give one more clout with publishers and more notoriety among journalists. The effect on one's writing, however, is nil - otherwise, one would be in deep trouble.
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I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist.
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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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I dont know if there is a personal identity. We all imagine that we are absolute individuals. But when we begin to look for where this individuality resides, its very difficult to find.
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If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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I am the worst judge of my books.
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There are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I know seems to have fallen out of my mind like a shower of rain, and I am gripped for a moment in paralysed dismay, waiting for it all to come back but with no certainty that it will.
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With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.
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All I wanted was to be left alone. They abhor a vacuum, other people. You find a quiet corner where you can hunker down in peace, and the next minute there they are, crowding around you in their party hats, tooting their paper whistles in your face and insisting you get up and join in the knees-up.
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I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
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A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.
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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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