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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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
Sentences
Invention
Civilization
Greatest
Human
Humans
Sentence
Crafts
More quotes by John Banville
I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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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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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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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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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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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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I am the worst judge of my books.
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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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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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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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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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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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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.
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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
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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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.
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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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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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