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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: 79
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Hard
Novelist
Novelists
Philosopher
Seriously
Writer
Wonderful
Though
Take
Dostoevsky

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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.
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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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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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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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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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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 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.
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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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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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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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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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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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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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