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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
Someone
Managed
Follow
Hold
Went
Hand
Hands

More quotes by John Banville

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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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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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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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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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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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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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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 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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If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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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 don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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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 Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
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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 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.
John Banville
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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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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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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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