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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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John Banville
Age: 78
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William 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.
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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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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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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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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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I am the worst judge of my books.
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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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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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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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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 think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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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.
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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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If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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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.
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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.
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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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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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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.
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