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

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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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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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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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I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
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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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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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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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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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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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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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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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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 Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
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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 don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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