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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
Left
Someone
Like
Violently
Room
Rooms
Alone

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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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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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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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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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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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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 am the worst judge of my books.
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The trouble with you, Vic, he said, is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.
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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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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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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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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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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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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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All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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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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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 never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
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