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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.

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
Sleep
Found
Always
Nightly
Uncanny
Rehearsal
Dress
Dresses
Dead

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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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I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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I am the worst judge of my books.
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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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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 live in Dublin, God knows why. There are greatly more congenial places I could have settled in - Italy, France, Manhattan - but I like the climate here, and Irish light seems to be essential for me and for my writing.
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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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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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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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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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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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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 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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I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.
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All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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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.
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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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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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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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