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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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John Banville
Age: 78
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Failure
Doubt
Full
Everything
Self

More quotes by 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.
John Banville
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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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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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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.
John Banville
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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.
John Banville
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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.
John Banville
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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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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
John Banville
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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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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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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.
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.
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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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If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
John Banville
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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 don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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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 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