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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
University
Went
Didn
Self
Never
Impatient
Arrogant
Educated
More quotes by John Banville
All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
John Banville
I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
John Banville
I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
John Banville
A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.
John Banville
Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
John Banville
If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
John Banville
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.
John Banville
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
...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
John Banville
I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist.
John Banville
We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
John Banville
Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.
John Banville
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.
John Banville
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.
John Banville
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.
John Banville
Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.
John Banville
With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.
John Banville
The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
John Banville
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.
John Banville
Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
John Banville