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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
Think
Thinking
Present
Living
Past
Really

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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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Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
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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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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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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.
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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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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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The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
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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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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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I am the worst judge of my books.
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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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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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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.
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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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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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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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