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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
Really
Think
Thinking
Present
Living
Past

More quotes by 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.
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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Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.
John Banville
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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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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
John Banville
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All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
John Banville
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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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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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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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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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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The trouble with you, Vic, he said, is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.
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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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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Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
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