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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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Prize
Deep
Journalist
Trouble
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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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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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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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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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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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If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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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 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've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
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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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