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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

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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 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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The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
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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 never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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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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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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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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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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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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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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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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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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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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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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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.
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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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