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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
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Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
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Humans
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More quotes by John Banville
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
The effect of prizes on one's career - if that is what to call it - is considerable, since they give one more clout with publishers and more notoriety among journalists. The effect on one's writing, however, is nil - otherwise, one would be in deep trouble.
John Banville
I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
John Banville
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
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
I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
John Banville
I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
John Banville
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.
John Banville
All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
John Banville
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
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
I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
John Banville
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
No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
John Banville
The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
John Banville
Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
John Banville
...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
John Banville
I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
John Banville
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.
John Banville
The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
John Banville
