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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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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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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.
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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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Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.
John Banville
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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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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
John Banville
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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
John Banville
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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
John Banville
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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
John Banville
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I am the worst judge of my books.
John Banville
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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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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
John Banville
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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.
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.
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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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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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.
John Banville
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Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
John Banville
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The first thought that occurred to me, that night when I heard the chairman of the jury announce my name, was, Just think how many people hate me at this moment. Naturally, I wanted to annoy those people even further by being arrogant.
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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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