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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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John Banville
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Think
Thinking
Present
Living
Past
Really

More quotes by 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.
John Banville
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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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Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.
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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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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 don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
John Banville
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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
John Banville
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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
John Banville
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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.
John Banville
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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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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.
John Banville
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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
John Banville
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Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don't do well, in the hope of learning.
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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
John Banville
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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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All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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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.
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.
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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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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