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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.

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
Nothing
Much
Men
Depend
Integrity
Depends
Others

More quotes by John Banville

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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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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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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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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
John Banville
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I am the worst judge of my books.
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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.
John Banville
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I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
John Banville
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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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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.
John Banville
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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.
John Banville
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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
John Banville
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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.
John Banville
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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
John Banville
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If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
John Banville
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I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
John Banville
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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.
John Banville
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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.
John Banville
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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.
John Banville