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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
Invention
Civilization
Greatest
Human
Humans
Sentence
Crafts
Sentences
More quotes by John Banville
In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
John Banville
If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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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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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 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
We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
John Banville
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
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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Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.
John Banville
And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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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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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.
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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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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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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
John Banville
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.
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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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All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
John Banville