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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
Civilization
Greatest
Human
Humans
Sentence
Crafts
Sentences
Invention

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.
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All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power I lied to lie. It was a way of living lies are life's almost-anagram.
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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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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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A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.
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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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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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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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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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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 don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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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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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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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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If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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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.
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.
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I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
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