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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: 78
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Less
Think
Thinking
Writer
Written

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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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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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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 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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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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I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
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I am the worst judge of my books.
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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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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 Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
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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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Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
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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 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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If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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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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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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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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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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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
John Banville