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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
Imagination
Secret
Defective
Survival

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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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.
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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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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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I am the worst judge of my books.
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.
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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.
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All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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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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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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
John Banville