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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
Take
Dostoevsky
Hard
Novelist
Novelists
Philosopher
Seriously
Writer
Wonderful
Though

More quotes by John Banville

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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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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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I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
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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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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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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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If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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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.
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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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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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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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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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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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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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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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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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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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All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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