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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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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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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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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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I am the worst judge of my books.
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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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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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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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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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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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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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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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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.
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All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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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.
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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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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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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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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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