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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left

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
Like
Violently
Room
Rooms
Alone
Left
Someone

More quotes by John Banville

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I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
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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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.
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.
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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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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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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I am the worst judge of my books.
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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I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
John Banville
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I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
John Banville
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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
John Banville
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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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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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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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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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
John Banville
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I dont know if there is a personal identity. We all imagine that we are absolute individuals. But when we begin to look for where this individuality resides, its very difficult to find.
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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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
John Banville