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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: 79
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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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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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 think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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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 don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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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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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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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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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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The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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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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I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
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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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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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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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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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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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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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