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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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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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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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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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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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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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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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Art is amoral, whether we accept this or not it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at heart.
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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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
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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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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
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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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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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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.
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.
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