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

More quotes by John Banville

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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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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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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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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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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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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.
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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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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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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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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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 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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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.
John Banville
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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 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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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.
John Banville
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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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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 sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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