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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.

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
Dies
Borne
Turns
Unimaginable
Littles
Drop
Little
Carry
Generations
Along
Dead
Turn
Bearers

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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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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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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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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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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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I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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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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The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
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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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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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I am the worst judge of my books.
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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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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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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 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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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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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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