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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.

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
Secret
Defective
Survival
Imagination

More quotes by John Banville

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I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
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Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.
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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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The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
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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 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.
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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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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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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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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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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
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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.
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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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
John Banville
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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.
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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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
John Banville