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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
Past
Really
Think
Thinking
Present
Living

More quotes by John Banville

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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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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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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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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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All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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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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I am the worst judge of my books.
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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.
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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 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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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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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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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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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 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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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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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
John Banville