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I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.

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
Impatient
Arrogant
Educated
University
Went
Didn
Self
Never

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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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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 think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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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 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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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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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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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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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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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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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 am the worst judge of my books.
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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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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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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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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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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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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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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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