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Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

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
Wonderful
Though
Take
Dostoevsky
Hard
Novelist
Novelists
Philosopher
Seriously
Writer

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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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Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
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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.
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I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
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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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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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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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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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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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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 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.
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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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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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The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
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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'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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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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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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