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

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Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.
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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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I am the worst judge of my books.
John Banville
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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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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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The secret of survival is a defective imagination.
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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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Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
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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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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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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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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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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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We think we're living in the present, but we're really living in the past.
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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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If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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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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