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: 79
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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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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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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Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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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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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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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 am the worst judge of my books.
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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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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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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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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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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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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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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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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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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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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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