Quote

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

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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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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 think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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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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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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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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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 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 trouble with you, Vic, he said, is that you think of the world as a sort of huge museum with too many visitors allowed in.
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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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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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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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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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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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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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All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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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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