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If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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
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Greatest
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Humans
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Sentence
Sentences
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Beings
More quotes by John Banville
I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
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I am the worst judge of my books.
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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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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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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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I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
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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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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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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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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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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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All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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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 think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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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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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
