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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
Hard
Novelist
Novelists
Philosopher
Seriously
Writer
Wonderful
Though
Take
Dostoevsky

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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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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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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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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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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
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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.
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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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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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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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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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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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