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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
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
Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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I am the worst judge of my books.
John Banville
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.
John Banville
I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
John Banville
Ian McEwan is a very good writer the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.
John Banville
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
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.
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've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
John Banville
If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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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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I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
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
The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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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.
John Banville
In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
John Banville
I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
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
We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
John Banville