Quote

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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John Banville
Age: 78
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Lying
Living
Anagrams
Power
Placement
Way
Lied
Life
Escape
Lies
Loved
Almost

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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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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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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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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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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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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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I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too 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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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 Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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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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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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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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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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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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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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