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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: 78
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Integrity
Depends
Others
Nothing
Much
Men
Depend

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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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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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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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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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...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 secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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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 think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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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 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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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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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.
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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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Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
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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 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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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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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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