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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: 79
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Dress
Dresses
Dead
Sleep
Found
Always
Nightly
Uncanny
Rehearsal

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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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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.
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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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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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Life is tragic but it's equally comic.
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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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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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I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.
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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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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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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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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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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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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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Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
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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.
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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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