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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: 79
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Never
Impatient
Arrogant
Educated
University
Went
Didn
Self

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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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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 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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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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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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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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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 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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I am the worst judge of my books.
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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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There are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I know seems to have fallen out of my mind like a shower of rain, and I am gripped for a moment in paralysed dismay, waiting for it all to come back but with no certainty that it will.
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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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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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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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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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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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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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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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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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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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