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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
Worst
Books
Book
Judge
Judging

More quotes by John Banville

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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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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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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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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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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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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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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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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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All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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Ian McEwan is a very good writer the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.
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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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I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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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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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.
John Banville
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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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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