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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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John Banville
Age: 78
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Writing
Really
Sink
Deep
Lost
Write
Order
Become
Self

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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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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.
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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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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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I am the worst judge of my books.
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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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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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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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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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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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Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
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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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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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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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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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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'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
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