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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
Thinking
Writer
Written
Less
Think

More quotes by John Banville

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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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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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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'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
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I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
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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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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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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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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
John Banville
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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 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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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.
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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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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 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.
John Banville
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I am the worst judge of my books.
John Banville
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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.
John Banville
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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
John Banville
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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
John Banville