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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
Rooms
Alone
Left
Someone
Like
Violently
Room

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Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
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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 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.
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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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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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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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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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All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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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 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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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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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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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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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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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.
John Banville
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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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