Quote

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.

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
Self
Colored
Caked
Thing
Layers
Dissembling
Lifetime
Toffee
Shall
Varnish
Left
Soot
Away
Grime
Soul
Layer
Come
Strip

More quotes by John Banville

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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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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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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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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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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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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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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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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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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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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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I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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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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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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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 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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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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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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