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: 78
Born: 1945
Born: December 8
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Benjamin Black
William John Banville
Come
Strip
Self
Colored
Caked
Thing
Layers
Dissembling
Lifetime
Toffee
Shall
Varnish
Left
Soot
Away
Grime
Soul
Layer

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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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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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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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I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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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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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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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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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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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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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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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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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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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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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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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 don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.
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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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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 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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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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