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I am the worst judge of my books.

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
Judge
Judging
Worst
Books
Book

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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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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 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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If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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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.
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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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All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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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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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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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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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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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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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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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 think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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