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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.

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
Written
Less
Think
Thinking
Writer

More quotes by John Banville

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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
John Banville
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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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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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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.
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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 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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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
John Banville
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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
John Banville
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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
John Banville
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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.
John Banville
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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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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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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'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
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.
John Banville
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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.
John Banville
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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
John Banville
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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
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I am the worst judge of my books.
John Banville