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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.

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
Hands
Someone
Managed
Follow
Hold
Went
Hand

More quotes by John Banville

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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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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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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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If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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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.
John Banville
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Everything we do is tinged with the knowledge that this may be the last time that we will do this, and that makes what we're doing incredibly sweet.
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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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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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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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