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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.
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
Soot
Left
Grime
Away
Layer
Soul
Strip
Come
Colored
Caked
Self
Layers
Dissembling
Thing
Toffee
Lifetime
Varnish
Shall
More quotes by John Banville
I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.
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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've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.
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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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And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.
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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 sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.
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...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left
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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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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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In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
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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 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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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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If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.
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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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The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.
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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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I am the worst judge of my books.
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