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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

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
Sentence
Crafts
Sentences
Invention
Civilization
Greatest
Human
Humans

More quotes by John Banville

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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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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 am the worst judge of my books.
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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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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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
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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
John Banville
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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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The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
John Banville
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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.
John Banville
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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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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
John Banville
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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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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.
John Banville
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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
John Banville
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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
John Banville
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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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.
John Banville
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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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