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

More quotes by John Banville

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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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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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All art at a certain level is entertainment. We go to a tragedy by Sophocles to be entertained.
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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 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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No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal.
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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 effect of prizes on one's career - if that is what to call it - is considerable, since they give one more clout with publishers and more notoriety among journalists. The effect on one's writing, however, is nil - otherwise, one would be in deep trouble.
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Where I went, no one could follow. Yet someone managed to hold my hand.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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 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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The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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