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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.
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
Trying
Things
Duty
Learning
Hope
Death
Keep
Wells
Well
More quotes by John Banville
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
Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.
John Banville
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.
John Banville
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.
John Banville
If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
John Banville
Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
John Banville
I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.
John Banville
We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
John Banville
Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
John Banville
All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
John Banville
The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
John Banville
The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
John Banville
In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
John Banville
A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.
John Banville
The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
John Banville
I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
John Banville
The first thought that occurred to me, that night when I heard the chairman of the jury announce my name, was, Just think how many people hate me at this moment. Naturally, I wanted to annoy those people even further by being arrogant.
John Banville
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
No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
John Banville
...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
John Banville
