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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: 79
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
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Prize
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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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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 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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I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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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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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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I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
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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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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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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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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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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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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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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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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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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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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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I am the worst judge of my books.
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