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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.

John Banville

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John Banville
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Defective
Survival
Imagination
Secret

More quotes by John Banville

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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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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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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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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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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.
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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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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
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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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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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Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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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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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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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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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 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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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
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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