Quote

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.

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
Come
Seem
Shower
Nothing
Waiting
Showers
Mind
Times
Nowadays
Like
Moment
Occur
Moments
Increasing
Paralysed
Seems
Certainty
Gripped
Back
Fallen
Dismay
Everything
Rain
Frequency

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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 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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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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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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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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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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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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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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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
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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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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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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 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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