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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: 78
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Present
Living
Past
Really
Think
Thinking

More quotes by John Banville

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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.
John Banville
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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 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.
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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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
John Banville
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The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
John Banville
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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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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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With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.
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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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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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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.
John Banville
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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.
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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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
John Banville
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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
John Banville
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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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 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.
John Banville