Quote

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: 78
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Level
Levels
Art
Certain
Sophocles
Entertained
Entertainment
Tragedy

More quotes by John Banville

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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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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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All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power I lied to lie. It was a way of living lies are life's almost-anagram.
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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.
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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
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Everything we do is tinged with the knowledge that this may be the last time that we will do this, and that makes what we're doing incredibly sweet.
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I live in Dublin, God knows why. There are greatly more congenial places I could have settled in - Italy, France, Manhattan - but I like the climate here, and Irish light seems to be essential for me and for my writing.
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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don't do well, in the hope of learning.
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I am the worst judge of my books.
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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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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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If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
John Banville
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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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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.
John Banville
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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.
John Banville
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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
John Banville