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I am the worst judge of my books.

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
Judge
Judging
Worst
Books
Book

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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.
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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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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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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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If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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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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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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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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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 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 Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
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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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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 think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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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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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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