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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

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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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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.
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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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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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If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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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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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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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 never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
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I am the worst judge of my books.
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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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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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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 think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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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 think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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